“Swing Time” by Zadie Smith; Penguin Press (464 pages, $27)

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“I ignored the ridiculous plots of these movies,” confides the never-named, first-person narrator of “Swing Time,” Zadie Smith’s fifth novel. “To me they were only roads leading to the dance.”

The narrator could be describing the 1936 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie, also titled “Swing Time,” which features some of the best dancing — and one of the dumbest plots — found in any of their movies.

But she’s also describing the life she shared with Tracey, boon companion and fellow aspiring dancer from her childhood, spent as two light-skinned girls of color in the same North London neighborhood where Smith grew up.

Like Smith herself, who once dreamed of a career in musical theater, both of them love musicals. Both of them love to dance. One of them — Tracey — actually has talent. But neither of them fully grasps the significance of the obstacles athwart the path toward success: Not just race but also — as always, with Smith — class.

There’s nothing reductive in the way that context gets presented; there’s no climactic, make-or-break moment dashing long-cherished dreams.

Instead one sees the incremental way in which dreams begin to curdle, as a steady accretion of poor choices and bad breaks catch up with raw talent. “With wealth you get to be thoughtless,” one character observes. Women like Tracey don’t have that luxury.

Women like Aimee — a Madonna-like superstar for whom the narrator serves as personal assistant — do. “She found her own story universally applicable,” the narrator tells us. “The border between Aimee and everybody else became obscure.”

Hence Aimee’s naïve effort to smudge such borders by opening a school for girls in Gambia; the narrator is one of the operatives on the ground tasked with connecting the dots between the work involved in building and Aimee’s quick visits to promote it. Those connections prove harder to make than the narrator had imagined.

“Even the simplest ideas I’d brought with me did not seem to work here when I tried to apply them,” the narrator admits. While Aimee’s team in New York debates the merits of teaching Darwin in Africa, one third of the school’s students are contracting malaria.

Smith’s novel swings time between the narrator’s formative years in London and her current challenges in Africa; the bridge connecting them isn’t always apparent.

It doesn’t help that the African chapters aren’t nearly as compelling as those spent in London; while Smith tries to avoid creating another morality tale involving the limits of feel-good philanthropy, her African characters aren’t sufficiently fleshed out. Perhaps this is Smith’s way of emphasizing that one can’t ever truly go home again.

There are no such issues when London comes calling; as in Smith’s “White Teeth” (2000) and especially “NW” (2012), these sharply rendered chapters explore how friendships change and warp when exposed to the weathering influence of history. But the joyous comedy characterizing “White Teeth” is gone; to an even greater extent than with “NW,” history in this often dark book hurts too much.

Growing up, the narrator and Tracey had hoped that dance might set them free, but attention must be paid to what the narrator’s mother drives home: One’s body is necessarily inscribed within the culture that contains it.

Gesturing at the narrator’s body, her mother insists that it can never matter in a world where one is “playing the game by their rules.” “If you play that game,” she continues, “you’ll end up a shade of yourself.” “I had never had any light of my own,” the narrator tells us early on, channeling Ralph Ellison. “I experienced myself as a kind of shadow.”

How can one function as a person or an artist, within a world where one can’t truly see oneself?

“We were taken out of our time and place, and then stopped from even knowing our time and place,” the narrator’s mother reflects. “You can’t do anything worse to a people than that.”

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