Monday, February 24, 2014

NW / The return of Zadie Smith / Review

The return of Zadie Smith

It has taken Zadie Smith seven years to write her latest, eagerly awaited novel. The result, NW, is the book of which she is proudest.

"You can't write a better book than you are.

But this is my favourite by a long, long way."

Zadie Smith

By Gaby Wood
25 Aug 2012

An evening in late July. Zadie Smith has come home from New York for the summer, and she is about to read for the first time from a novel that has taken up the past seven or eight years of her life. Her editor is there, and her agent, both of whom have been with her since before the publication of her debut, White Teeth, 12 years ago. The crowd is small and well-disposed towards her; the bar is called Paradise. Wearing jeans and a pale blouse, with a red scarf wrapped around her head, she walks on to a small stage, lifts a pair of large-rimmed glasses to her eyes, and begins.

'You can't smoke in a playground. It's obvious,' she reads in a low, warm voice. 'Any half-civilised person ought to know that…' Before long, she quietly, almost surreptitiously, has the audience in stitches.

'It was such a joy to read,' she tells me a week later over lunch. 'It's lovely to hear people laugh – particularly when you've been sitting in a room for seven years and not laughing.'

The pain of writing the long-awaited NW ('Most writers, if you took away the writing, they'd be much happier,' she says), and the eventful period in her life it has occupied, have had palpable results. During the gestation of NW, Smith's father died, her daughter was born, she moved to Rome and then to New York. 'But, to put it cheesily, it's heart-expanding, isn't it?' she says. 'It's a real exercise in experience.'

Smith, traditionally a master of self-criticism and a squirmer in the spotlight, seems today to have a certain ease about her. Indeed, everything about the book and the moment suggests she has come into her own. She is 36, which she describes as 'a happy time of life'. Six years ago I interviewed her in the aftermath of On Beauty, a prize-winning novel she dissed in a single lethal stroke: 'Next time I'm going to write something slightly more to my taste.' She spoke of writing a book 'that is profoundly you, a genuine expression of your existence'. 'That's really tough,' she said, before adding drily, 'and quite easily avoided for an entire career, I should think.'

In retrospect, the novel she was describing, or at least dreaming of, wasNW, and it's hard not to share her joy when she says that she is 'much prouder of this book than any book I've ever written. All your books have your faults in them,' she adds. 'You can't write a better book than you are. But this is my favourite by a long, long way.'

Three years ago, in the foreword to her book of essays, Changing My Mind, Smith suggested that 'when you are first published at a young age, your writing grows with you, and in public'. That may be true of many writers, but for a woman who sold her first book before she had finished university, and whose debut was treated as some kind of messianic ushering in of the new literary millennium, a second act is particularly hard to concoct. Now she is on her fourth, and in it she has filmed in close-up the streets of White Teeth – those parts of Willesden built up, in her depiction, of manic cultural collisions.

We are discussing it, as it were, on set: a pub on Kilburn High Road. Though Smith now teaches creative writing at New York University for half the year, she and her family come back so often they have kept the house ('I'm a Londoner – I've bought property. Over my dead body am I going to give it up,' she laughs). But no matter how frequent the visits, a victory lap is always in order. 'I went to see my mum. She made me go to the bookshop, then the card shop, there's like a pound shop opposite, I had to go in and say hello to the family. I have to do the rounds. Local girl. Bit relentless.'

But she wouldn't have it any other way. She loves walking down this road and seeing three generations' worth of faces she recognises. She loves bumping into her brother – sort of. 'He's a personal trainer, absolutely huge, and yesterday I was walking down the street and he not very funnily pretended to be a mugger.'

When pressed on the idea of a return to north-west London in her fiction, though, she will say first of all that she never really left (parts of On Beauty were set here), and secondly that she tries, if anything, to resist it. 'I don't really want to end up the bard of Willesden Green.' Still, she admits that 'most writers are in the end local writers', and that it's easier to write about the things you love.

NW follows four local characters in their 30s – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – and their respective families and spouses and lovers and friends. In many ways they started out the same (from the same estate, or the same school) and have landed at points of sharp contrast; a diaspora of so-called neighbours.

Some readers will see elements of autobiography in Natalie, the alienated girl with the intractable work ethic who changes her name and moves into a house near the estate where she grew up. But when I ask Smith the predictable question – how much of her is in the character – she grimaces. 'God, I really hope I'm not like Natalie, that would be a very depressing thing. She's not a very nice person.'

If the book makes a point using the city, you might say it is that for these characters, distance cannot be measured on a map. Distance is about how far you've come from your origins by growing up or getting rich, about how low you can fall and how much it takes to claw your way back, about how to know who you are and what you want.

And the only way to register this particular city's telltale inflections, the book suggests, is through speech. Smith does this breathtakingly well – a brief conversation will tell you everything about character. (Felix, rolling a cigarette, goes to meet a public schoolboy, who he hopes will sell him a car. 'Shall we? I mean, can you do that and walk?' 'With one hand and running, bruv.' 'Ha. Very good. This way.')

If you wanted to compare the maturity of this book to White Teeth, you might say that while her first novel aimed to show what Smith could do,NW reveals what she can hear – both what she cares to hear, and how she renders it technically. She strips back almost everything else, as if a novel were merely a matter of eavesdropping.

'It's so funny,' she reflects, 'Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel. I wrote White Teeth kind of feeling ashamed all the time. But now I think it's one of the few places where you can try not to manipulate. You can't know what's going on in somebody's heart or head – but you can listen, and write down speech. It's not honest or dishonest, it's just… what there is.'

She wanted this book to be 'like a problem play'. 'There's something about those problem plays, they're like little machines in which you come out the other end, and you feel odd. It's not a comedy, it's not a tragedy, it's like a great replication of what it feels like to be alive. I wanted to make a little contraption where, when you were in it, I wasn't forcing you to feel one way or another. It's hard to not bully your reader, to have some restraint.'

In fact, Smith offers so few descriptions of her characters that I wonder whether that in itself was a political point: don't judge people on what they look like, listen instead to what they say. There is a moment in the novel when a character makes her friends laugh because she has told a story many times and left out until the latest rendition what they consider to be a key detail: 'How could you not mention the headscarf!' they say. Smith herself is doing something similar throughout the book.

'It's an existential point,' she replies. 'It's beyond politics. I decided the only race I was going to mention was white people, so anyone who's white is identified consistently. I suppose I want to show a world in which people who are not white are not determined by white people. And it proves to be incredibly hard to do that. You realise if you grow up black in England that to a lot of people here being black is in itself a political statement. But we're neutral to ourselves, you understand.'

While living in Rome, Smith read Camus and Sartre, and James Baldwin'sThe Fire Next Time. The reading developed into a kind of homemade apprenticeship, during which she conceived the idea of writing what she describes as 'a black existential novel'. That sounds, perhaps, as though she has reworked Nausea or The Outsider, just as she made On Beautya tribute to Howards End. But NW has too much formal inventiveness for that. Smith was simply struck by the fact that 'books about people like me, black people, have often been very concerned with the search for identity, and I thought, that's all very well and good, but this is the 21st century and black people like everybody else also have an existential crisis.'

At what point, I ask, did she feel that her existence was seen as a political statement?

'I think only when I published. I grew up in a community in which nothing could be more normal than a mixed-race girl. A third of the people in my school were mixed-race kids. But publishing is not a very mixed world. I was surprised to be such a surprise to people.'

Zadie Smith's first home was on the opposite side of the same street in which she lives now, a pretty, low-rise council estate called Athelstan Gardens. Her mother, Yvonne Bailey, had moved to London from Jamaica at the age of 15, and then married Harvey Smith, who was white, British and much older. They went on to have two boys, Ben and Luke (Ben, once a rapper, is now a comedian and actor who uses the name Doc Brown), and they divorced when Zadie was a teenager – a studious girl and precocious author of sonorous words (at 14, around the time her mother gave her Zora Neale Hurston to read, she changed her name from Sadie to Zadie).

She read, more or less, for a living, or instead of one. 'My mind is novel-shaped,' she once told me, by way of explaining the way her imagination was trained. Her mother was a library zealot, and her father an autodidact. 'Pretty much the only place my parents' marriage could be considered a match made in heaven,' she said recently, 'was on their bookshelves.' Smith claims she was a large child, and 'invisible', which was how she knuckled down. 'That's the problem with pretty girls, they never get anything done.' To this day, what confidence she has stems from this: 'the belief that once you learn to read, nothing is beyond you in its essence'.

She became the first person in her family to go to university, and found Cambridge transformative. In her second year, she published a story in a student anthology, and later met the boy who had edited it, Nick Laird. They married in King's College chapel in 2004.

If Smith has doubts about her abilities as a writer, she finds compensation in being part of a community of other writers. 'I think you have to be interested in literature in general, not just the stuff you happen to write,' she says. 'That's just one little window in a massive, extraordinary church.'

Some writers are very private, others are actively jealous and competitive; Smith has always been an enthusiast, gathering writers to her as colleagues, admiring her elders like a fan collecting autographs, championing her peers, delighted to discover something new. Apart from her teaching, which she loves, she has edited a volume of short prose (The Book of Other People), has translated from Italian, continues to write criticism and, privately, she is good at keeping in touch with her fiction-producing friends. If writing itself were a political movement, she would be among its most engaged and democratic followers.

She and Laird, now a respected poet at Princeton University, have always shown each other their work, and she relies on him to be her fiercest critic. With the new book, he told her the last third had gone very wrong, and she rewrote it in a matter of months, finishing in April this year.

I ask her in what terms he softened the blow. 'He doesn't really do that,' she says. 'You know, it hurts a bit, and you can have a row about it, but the person is trying to save your face in front of many more people. Of course, within a marriage, you're constantly thinking: are you saying this because I didn't wash up? But I suppose I fundamentally believe Nick is on my side, because I'm fundamentally on his side, and he was being honest, and he's a good reader. I know I must be very boring going on about what I owe him.'

The birth of Kit two and a half years ago was, inevitably, life-altering. Not just for Smith, whose cerebral, 40-a-day habits were shaken up, but for a couple whose work had been shared to the point where it was almost in lieu of children, something akin to mutual midwifery.

'It's a shock to recognise your body,' Smith says, nodding. 'I really didn't care about my body – not just didn't care, I had contempt for people who were fit. And now I swim and I run and I don't smoke. And I do feel a lot better. Once you give birth you do feel a lot less scared of things. I was always so scared of everything.

'I think our generation had so much fear that it was all going to go horribly wrong, because we weren't taught about mothering, we were taught how to get an education,' she reflects. 'I was so surprised to find my daughter thought I was all right. I still can't get over it. She really likes me!'

Smith says the changed dynamic between her and Laird is 'fascinating, because we've known each other a very long time, so we're symbiotic, one way or another, and it is weird when another person turns up. I just think it's been a real relief. Before, we were obsessive, we were always working.' They would like to have more children, and at least now, she says, 'I've written a book I can stand behind and say: I wrote this book and I'm proud of it. Which is such a big difference. It's hard to feel proud of things you did when you were very young because you change so quickly in those years.'

They are learning to relax. Well, Laird has always been a little better at it than she has. 'If I'm reading he'll say, you're still working. But to me the greatest pleasure is to read. I love to be drunk – that helps. That's why a lot of writers drink – you don't have to be engaged. I love to dance, and sing – in the shower, not in public. I'm too old to go raving but my fondest memories are of that kind of thing – dancing, with lots of people, outside if possible.'

In the years before Kit was born, Smith and Laird moved to Rome. Smith had written three novels in fairly quick succession, and professed to dislike them all to varying degrees. She turned more seriously to criticism, and described herself as a 'recovering novelist'. But she was primarily recovering from something else: the death of her father, in 2006, at the age of 81.

'After my dad died, I went to Rome and just mourned a bit, to be honest,' she says. 'Everything was too sad. I couldn't stay. So I left.'

Later, she wrote one of her best essays based around his sense of humour (his legacy was a box set of Fawlty Towers DVDs they had watched together), in which she mentions how little she wrote during those two years away, when a portion of his ashes sat in a Tupperware box on her desk. 'Imagined worlds seemed utterly pointless. I miss my dad a lot,' she says. 'Like him, I've got a fairly quiet spirit compared with some of my family, so I miss that. But at the same time, his not being around made me more fully engaged with the chaos on the other side of the family, and I learnt to enjoy it much more. My mum is 100 watts and my brothers are very charismatic, and when I was a teenager I was always like, can you all chill out a bit, please? But you realise of course that this is the engine of your fiction: you don't want your life to be ordered, quiet and controlled.'

Harvey Smith died before Kit was born. 'Which is a shame,' Smith says, 'because Kit looks a lot like him, and when I look at her I often think of him.'

After lunch we walk across the park to collect Kit, a blond-ringleted sprite in need of an ice lolly. I walk them to their door and leave them to their afternoon, Smith punching around in her bag for keys; Kit calling through the letterbox to her dad.

THE TELEGRAPH