Accepting a literary prize in Ohio last year, the novelist Zadie Smith described “feeling somewhat alienated from myself, experiencing myself as a posthumous entity”. Smith is only 50, but there is indeed something of the afterlife about the material gathered in her new book, which bundles various odds and ends from the past nine years: speeches, opinion pieces, criticism and eulogies for departed literary heroes – Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel.

In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár, a once revered conductor who finds herself shunned by the younger cohort, takes on existential proportions: “Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach any more – and the seas are rising!”

Those pesky “kids” stalk the pages of Dead and Alive, most noticeably at the level of language. When Smith deploys a nonchalant “IMHO” in an otherwise stately meditation on historical fiction, it feels plausibly organic. But many of her flirtations with the vernacular are prefaced by awkward, vaguely apologetic disclaimers: “as the youngs [sic] say”; “as the kids say”; “as the present cliché goes”; “To use one of the template phrases of the moment”. The cumulative effect is a little embarrassing. (In one unfortunate instance, a puzzling reference to “the circle-jerk of contemporary dating”, it seems she doesn’t know the meaning of the slang expression she has commandeered.)

There are upsides to being slightly out of touch. One is that you feel less obligated to pay lip service to the reductive pieties that grease the wheels of cultural commentary. Reflecting on a Parisian exhibition of global objets d’art originally collected in 18th-century Dresden, Smith suggests the word “Eurocentric” is doing too much heavy lifting in the gallery texts, “as if the curators, in their wisdom, had decided to take power – especially colonial power – at its own word”. Elsewhere, she bemoans the “unhinged” tone that lets down some biographies of overlooked literary women: “by turns furious, defensive, melancholy and tragic, their very intensity keeps the muse in her place, orbiting the great man”. In such works, score-settling zeal can obscure the complexity of human relationships: “If male artists sometimes stage dramas of power, it is not unknown for female artists to make a performance of masochism. Neither performance should be entirely trusted.”

The moral bean-counting school of criticism makes for an impoverished discourse, as Smith notes in an essay on the painter Kara Walker, whose work riffs knowingly on racialised caricature. Minority artists are routinely upbraided from both sides, either for pandering to the white gaze or “being insufficiently empowering … neglecting to provide, for a black audience, some necessary form of ‘self-care’”. They should be allowed “to make work without shame”. Smith steers a similarly sensible middle course on the vexed debate around “cultural appropriation” in fiction, acknowledging the understandable “desire to be once and for all free of the limited – and limiting – fantasies and projections of other people” while insisting on the prerogatives of the novelist. There is more to people than their identity – “we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood”.

The point is well made in a thoughtful piece on James Baldwin and the craft of writing, originally a lecture delivered to creative writing students over Zoom during the pandemic. Smith reminds her students that the essence of Baldwin’s brilliance was his ability to process politics through personal experience: he “submitted to his consciousness first and then re-examined what that might mean for his conscience”. This is sound advice, and Smith’s positions on the politics of creativity are beyond reproach, albeit commonsensical – amounting, essentially, to a caution against overcorrection and incuriosity.

When it comes to actual politics, she is less assured. Her New Yorker op-ed on the war in Gaza, published in May 2024, was widely interpreted as unhelpfully equivocal, and seemed to conflate anti-war protesters with antisemites. She has since added her signature to an open letter acknowledging Israel’s actions as genocidal. The New Yorker piece, reprinted here with a new preamble hailing the protesters as “heroic”, is an intriguing artefact: the prose is mealy mouthed, heavy on the passive voice – all the more conspicuous since Smith’s writing is normally so clear and crisp. Grasping to account for this, I was reminded of her observation in a speech to environmental activists just a few pages earlier that “most street-level climate denial is actually sincere. Because the truth really is too terrible to contemplate.”

In another speech, from 2018, Smith pays tribute to the postwar settlement that bequeathed us the NHS and the modern welfare state, and is being “deliberately dismantled by means of a concerted, fifty-year-long process of financial deregulation and privatisation … which it is well within our power to reverse”. On the eve of the 2024 general election, she reiterates this sentiment, in hope that “the next time the bright bird of potential equity flies past the ship of state, we might remember what it looks like … and not let any Tories or Neo-Liberals rush up on to the deck to shoot it down”. This modest aspiration would place Smith firmly to the left of the Starmerites, but her political instincts are centrist; she showed little enthusiasm for Jeremy Corbyn during his leadership of the Labour party, even though his platform was broadly in line with the views expressed here. (She has uttered his name in print just once, to put the boot in after Brexit.)

It’s as though Smith can’t quite decide if she’s a bien pensant pragmatist or an idealistic dreamer. In this respect she’s perhaps no different to many thousands of ambivalent liberal-ish voters. Fair enough – she’s a novelist, not a political theorist. What’s interesting is how all this relates to her metier, given that the catastrophic stagnation of centre-left politics – up to and including the present government – has coincided with a crisis in media. “For the past 15 years we have … been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate,” she writes. The same technological forces that have riven the body politic are threatening to destroy literary culture as we know it.

Against this backdrop, Smith’s nostalgic evocations of analogue-era television are doubly poignant. TV dramas, she suggests, were not so very different to novels: “The seamlessness, the sharp cuts, the fades in and out … the storification of every element of life.” She believes the novel, with its unique capacity to generate empathy, can act as a bulwark against the oppressive uniformity of the algorithm. A lovely sentiment, but at this point it feels like an article of faith: the genie is out of the bottle. “I would rather the kids knew stories than soundbites,” Smith writes, and most sensible people would concur. The trouble is, as every embattled parent knows, that’s no longer her call – or ours – to make.

• Dead and Alive: Essays by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton (£22). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.