At the beating heart of Zadie Smith’s latest collection, “Feel Free,” an eclectic mix of book reviews, celebrity profiles, awards speeches and long-form philosophical musings, is an essay called “Getting Out and In.” A consideration of Jordan Peele’s debut feature film “Get Out” alongside the controversial Dana Schutz painting “Open Casket,” the essay drew praise and ire in equal measure when it was first published in Harper’s Magazine last July.

The painting under consideration in “Getting Out and In” is an abstract portrait of Emmett Till’s ravaged corpse; the question at hand is whether a white woman had any right to paint it. Taking, at face value, writer and performance artist Hannah Black’s open letter to the Whitney, co-signed by dozens of black artists, urging that the painting be removed from the Whitney Biennial “with the urgent recommendation that (it) be destroyed,” Smith dutifully points out that to destroy art is “the province of Nazis and censorious evangelicals.”

Her real answer, though, comes in an intense moment of intimacy and identification as she stands before the painting itself. Smith is the biracial daughter of a black Jamaican mother and a white British father.

What has this to do with Peele’s horror-comedy, in which black characters are lobotomized and inhabited by white parasites who control them from the inside? As Smith points out in another essay, Peele is biracial, too, and by juxtaposing “Get Out” with “Open Casket,” she reads a level of anxiety about being biracial into the film that few of its overwhelmingly enthusiastic critics have noticed. The film’s black victims, Smith hints chillingly, are not just metaphors for the sort of cultural appropriation of which Schutz stands accused. They are also metaphors for the biracial American experience itself, with its long history of rape: “To be biracial in America ... was in a literal sense to live with the enemy within.”

Smith leans vertiginously into this schism. And then, just as suddenly, she pulls away. “(T)he truth is I didn’t feel very much,” she says of Schutz’s painting, later repeating: “The truth is that this painting and I are simply not in profound communication.”

This rhetorical pattern of intimacy and withholding characterizes much of Smith’s best essay-writing, and though it can be frustrating, it creates a hypnotic rhythm that is undeniably effective. “Some Notes on Attunement,” a meditation on Smith’s sudden love of Joni Mitchell’s music after years of antipathy, is perhaps the loveliest example. Standing with her husband at Tintern Abbey, she has a kind of epiphany: “As I remember it, sun flooded the area; my husband quoted a line from one of William Wordsworth’s Lucy poems; I began humming a strange piece of music. Something had happened to me.” The grass is green, the music is “Blue.”

The moment passes swiftly, revealing, as always, Smith’s true subject: the radical discontinuity of a self “whose boundaries are uncertain, whose language is never pure, whose world is in no way ‘self-evident.’?” Diving into the cracks between her former and current self, Smith asks, “Who was that person? Petulant, hardly aware that she was humming Joni, not yet conscious of the transformation she had already undergone. ... How does such a change occur?”

The sturdiest promise of the realist novel, of which Smith is currently both our best theorist and most devoted practitioner, remains its ability to create empathy with those unlike ourselves. While Smith is not naive about this claim, she finds a way to tolerate its worst offenses; a lengthy assessment of J. G. Ballard’s “Crash” begins with the older white author snubbing her on a riverboat and ends with the shrugging observation that “dreams are often perverse.” Such ambivalence can be surprisingly moving.

Amy Gentry is a freelancer and the author of the novel “Good as Gone.”