Commentary - Jason Cowley asks if Zadie Smith can ever repeat her first, astonishing success

Should one feel sympathy for 25-year-old Zadie Smith? Should one feel sympathy for a young writer who, it seems, has everything she wants, at an age when most of her peers are still writing out of their bottom drawer (or not writing at all, so insufficient is their life experience): fabulous advances, critical acclaim, literary prizes, new celebrity muckers and a £5m BBC mini-series in production? In a way, yes. For her Whitbread-winning debut, White Teeth, a sprawling, polyvoiced comedy about the struggles of second-generation immigrants in a recognisable multicultural London, is a first novel so swaggering and uninhibited, so vivid and authentic, that it's hard to think she will ever write anything quite as good again. Or at least, nothing that she writes will ever have the same engaging precocity - because there is something freakish about Smith's performance, something Tiger Woodsish; it's the literary equivalent of Bob Beamon's famous long jump, when he smashed the world record, at altitude, during the Mexico City Olympic Games of 1968, virtually jumping out of the pit. How do you follow that?

Beamon certainly didn't, spending the rest of a mediocre career attempting (and failing) to match his fabulous jump in the thin air of a Mexican evening. Will the same happen to Smith? One hopes not, but literary history tells us that writing an outstanding first novel can be as much of a hindrance as a liberation. The burden of expectation created by your own success can be too great. One need only look at the careers of, say, Joseph Heller (Catch 22), Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) or Henry Roth (Call It Sleep) to understand how the writing life can become nothing but a painful struggle to recapture lost glory.

The story of Henry Roth is certainly one of the strangest in all literature. Born in 1906 in Galicia, then an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Roth settled with his Yiddish-speaking parents as a boy in New York, in the teeming tenements of the Lower East Side. At the age of 21, when he was a student at City College, he met the poet and academic Eda Lou Walton, who was 12 years older than him. Soon he was living with Walton and mixing with bohemian sophisticates such as Hart Crane and Margaret Mead. Under Walton's clinical gaze, he began working on a novel, Call It Sleep, which was published in 1934. Rich in vernacular energy, it tells of a young Jewish immigrant struggling to adapt to the realities of a slum boyhood in New York. "When you read something authentic like that," Arthur Miller said, "it feeds your belief in the whole art."

The novel was well received; but it wasn't until after it was reissued in 1964 that it became a literary sensation, selling more than a million copies and becoming the first paperback to be reviewed on the front of the New York Times Book Review. By which time, Roth had all but disappeared. He had made a faltering attempt at a second novel, about a boxer whose hand was sliced off in a factory accident, and then nothing. (It is hard now not to read that unpublished novel as a prescient commentary on Roth's own failing powers as a writer.) And so began his decades of internal exile, in Boston and then Maine, teaching a little, working as a firefighter, a labourer, a farmer and as an assistant at a mental hospital. He eventually settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he died in 1995, but not before publishing, 60 years after Call It Sleep, a flatly written, semi-autobiographical novel sequence called A Star Shines Out Over Mt Morris Park, which was received with great disappointment by all admirers of the verbal exuberance and originality of the earlier book.

Roth is not alone in his journey from early success to disappointed maturity. Many of my favourite novels are the first - Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard - by writers who, for whatever reason, never wrote so well again.

In 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for The God of Small Things, another first novel of extraordinary accomplishment, which had taken five years to write. Exhausted by her striving, she told me, soon after winning the prize, that she had nothing more to give. "Ever since I was quite young, I have not believed in professions. I don't want to say that I'm a writer and so I'm going to write another book. I will only write if I feel that I have something to say. People should respect that you are creatively exhausted after a novel. I become very annoyed when publishers try to get me to sign another contract."

She is surely right. The mistake, as I see it, is to view a writing life as a career, rather than a vocation or calling; as something you must keep doing again and again, like a job, even when you have nothing more to say or give - even when you are merely in pursuit of the ghost traces of a lost inspiration.

Zadie Smith is smart enough to understand the dangers that lie ahead. Already, she is speaking of the distractions of her ephemeral London life, and of her desire to disappear to somewhere remote in order to complete her second novel. She is also in flight from responsibility, favourably quoting a line from the film American Beauty: "I'm looking for a job with the least possible responsibility". "That is completely my attitude," she told the Telegraph. "Writing books is about the least possible responsibility you can have."

In truth, the only responsibility that Zadie Smith has is to her talent. One hopes that she will be allowed - and will allow herself - to fulfil it.

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