Photo illustration by Slate. Images via Ben Bailey-Smith and Monir HossainTwo Paths for the Novelist
Zadie Smith burst onto the scene in 2000. Why did her later novels falter—and how did she get her mojo back?
BY LAURA MILLER“I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody,” the British novelist Zadie Smith wrote of her childhood. “Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” These chameleon longings have always animated her fiction, which in the nearly 25 years since the publication of White Teeth has wandered over a seemingly random terrain of subjects and styles. Nevertheless, this desire is the closest thing her work has made to an argument. The purpose of novels, as Smith sees it, is to give writers as well as readers imagined access to the minds and experiences of other people, full stop. Not everyone considers that end sufficient in itself, but even those who do must admit that an ethos so willing to subsume itself in other points of view risks losing its compass. Smith has an alarming tendency—in a writer so confident—to take critics’ views of her novels too seriously. When she drifts from the wellspring of vitality that drives her best work, it’s often some idea about what novels ought to be that has distracted her. Her new novel, The Fraud, feels like a mad sprint away from such influences into the fogeyish realm of historical fiction. Sequestered there, she succeeds in rekindling her old mojo.
Eliza Touchet, the central character of The Fraud, is, like Smith, ferociously interested in the mystery of her fellow human beings, even the “awful” ones. A middle-aged Scotswoman who keeps house for her once-successful novelist cousin, Eliza is enthralled by a famous real-life trial in 1860s England. A man claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a fortune and a baronetcy, once thought lost at sea. Skeptics pointed out that this man, known as the Claimant, could not understand a word of French, Sir Roger’s first language, and lacked a tattoo inscribed on the heir by a childhood friend. The Claimant’s champions pointed to Sir Roger’s mother’s conviction that the man really was her son.The case became the 19th-century version of a media circus, spurring one of the lengthiest civil trials in English history. Eliza Touchet cares less for the Claimant than she does for a former servant of Sir Roger’s, Andrew Bogle, a Jamaican man who publicly supports the claim. To Eliza and most of her middle-class cohort, the Claimant seems an obvious liar, yet Bogle, who says he recognizes the man as Sir Roger, strikes her as a paragon of authenticity.
This is just the sort of paradox that has long fueled Smith’s work, that very human capacity to be quite sure of two contradictory things at once. In her much-celebrated 2000 debut, White Teeth, three separate bands of activists converge on a press conference touting a genetically engineered mouse. Everyone—the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Islamists who deplore the mouse as an abomination, the animal rights saboteurs who want to liberate it, and the scientists who created the little creature—is absolutely convinced that they are in the right.* Smith never tips her hand, though, and may not even have a position to convey.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when the concept of “multiculturalism” was all the rage, Smith’s omnivorous literary inclinations dovetailed beautifully with the prevailing intellectual and moral trends. Two decades later, Smith felt obliged to defend herself against what she perceived to be “the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us.” She’s smart enough to know that few people actually endorse this reductive view, and too politic to acknowledge how often critiques of improper representation mask the increasingly pitched competition among members of the educated classes for such goodies as book contracts. Still, she has a point. What was once considered her distinguishing quality as a writer—her ability to project herself into the character of, say, a middle-aged immigrant from Pakistan or the son of a self-mythologizing family of Jewish bohemians—now seems, if not suspicious, then certainly beside the point. Identity is currently a commodity that can be leveraged to a novelist’s advantage, provided it serves to confirm that her fiction speaks from experience—that it is, in fact, a veiled form of memoir or nonfiction. Confession trumps imagination.
“It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore,” writes Smith ruefully of this state of affairs. She ought to be more sanguine about the likelihood that the pendulum will swing back, but who, really, likes to admit that the moral imperatives of criticism go in and out of fashion just like styles of prose or cover art? The Fraud does acknowledge this. Eliza’s cousin, William Harrison Ainsworth, a producer of overwrought-but-once-very-popular gothic novels, expresses bafflement at the success of Middlemarch, a novel about “just a lot of people going about their lives in a village—dull lives at that.” Is this, he asks Eliza, “all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?” Mocked in the pages of an American journal by none other than Edgar Allan Poe (a wicked satirist in his day), William anxiously asks Eliza if he is in fact a fraud. William is far from the only person in the novel to feel like an impostor, and you can include his creator among them. Smith can be self-deprecating to the point of absurdity. When she falters as an artist, it’s not because she fails to keep up with the shifts in literary tastes, but because she tries too hard to accommodate the imperatives of her critics.
Not long after White Teeth was published, the critic James Wood wrote an essay for the New Republic, titled “Human, All Too Inhuman,” in which he coined a term for the long, complex, social novels then in vogue: “hysterical realism.” He grouped Smith’s debut with books by such venerable postmodernists as Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, as well as with the young comers Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. She was the only woman writer among them and, with the exception of Salman Rushdie, the only writer of color. Wood complained that such novels suffered from an excess of storytelling and an almost paranoid preoccupation with linking up their many subplots in a web of forced meaning. They exhibited, he felt, “a showy liveliness, a theatricality, that almost succeeds in hiding the fact that they are without life.”
This type of novel has since gone quite out of fashion for reasons not related to Wood’s critique. The possibility that Rushdie and Smith might have wanted to write such novels for reasons related to their identities—Rushdie was born into a Kashmiri Muslim family in India and immigrated to Britain; Smith is the daughter of a white British man and a Black Jamaican immigrant mother—never seems to have occurred to Wood. (Today no editor would have allowed him to get away with such an omission.) For Smith, all that multiplicity is just the condition of Willesden, the London neighborhood where she grew up and that features in so much of her work, a “big, colorful, working-class sea,” as she described it in a lecture given at the New York Public Library at the dawn of Barack Obama’s presidency. “I know that Obama has a double consciousness,” she explained in the same speech, “is Black and, at the same time, white, as I am.” Smith doesn’t assert the singularized identity of “biracial,” but claims two seemingly incompatible identities at once.
Soon after Wood’s essay came out, Smith published a response in the Guardian in which she agreed with him about hysterical realism, “a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth,” then went on to defend some of the other novelists he’d accused of being all head and no heart. She challenged the narrowness of Wood’s taste, arguing that “literature is—or should be—a broad church. Whatever the weaknesses of the various writers Wood mentioned, I don’t believe he would wish for a literary landscape missing a book such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or DeLillo’s White Noise.” Possibly he would, but Smith certainly wouldn’t. To want, to believe in, only one kind of fiction would be like caring about only one kind of person, the kind of person who believes what you believe.
When Smith published her first essay collection in 2008, she titled it Changing My Mind, a confession of the mutability of her own opinions. Changing My Mind revealed Smith to be a gifted, omnivorous critic, an appreciator of writers ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to David Foster Wallace, but also susceptible to the forceful imperatives of those, like Wood, who advocate for a particular path. In an appreciation of E.M. Forster—whose Howards End inspired her third and best novel, On Beauty—she quotes a radio broadcast Forster made during the Second World War. “Do we, in these terrible times, want to be humanists or fanatics?” Forster asked. “I have no doubt as to my own wish. I would rather be a humanist with all his faults than a fanatic with all his virtues.” Smith’s fiction is often populated with fanatics, but only because her humanism makes her want to get inside their heads.
Her equally splendid second essay collection, published in 2018, is called Feel Free, as close to a credo as Smith will ever get. Freedom has been her ongoing preoccupation. In The Fraud, Eliza envies the freedom of the men of her class, believing that the restrictions imposed upon her as a woman have kept her from living a real life. She falls in love with William’s wife, Fanny, and through her becomes involved with the abolitionist movement. She fantasizes about running off with Fanny to become like the Ladies of Llangollen, two Irishwomen who lived together as a couple in Wales, where their cottage attracted such pilgrims to the cause of unconventionality as Lord Byron and Wordsworth, who wrote a sonnet about them.
But she hasn’t got the nerve—freedom is a practice as well as a condition—and after Fanny dies, Eliza comes to live with William to help raise his three daughters. As his literary career blossoms, their home (in Willesden!) becomes a gathering place where Eliza meets the celebrated illustrator George Cruikshank, William Makepeace Thackeray, and Charles Dickens, among other Victorian luminaries. Eliza recognizes Dickens’ talent and what she calls his “magnetism” from early on, but she also finds him sly and a kind of “vampire,” forever tapping into the people around him for fictional material. When a controversy springs up about “the pernicious moral effect” of novels like William’s, Dickens quickly and thoroughly distances himself from the man who had once been his best friend.
Smith’s mistrust of Dickens is well taken. He is the British author she has most often been compared with. Both love the multifarious liveliness of big cities. Both have the knack of sketching vivid minor characters. And both are, at heart, comic novelists. Wood (wrongly) accuses Smith of sharing Dickens’ tendency toward caricature while lacking Dickens’ “immediate access to strong feeling,” the aptitude that comic novels require to lift them above the ranks of mere entertainment. In fact, the most significant difference between the two is Smith’s reluctance to moralize about her characters, where Dickens applies a lavish layer of sugary conventional piety over everything. Surely nothing in The Fraud seems more typical of Dickens’ worst side than his willingness to turn his back on William once his friend is branded as the Victorian equivalent of problematic.
Nevertheless, it seems Smith took Wood’s criticism to heart. In an influential essay called “Two Paths for the Novel,” Smith considered the example of Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder. Austere and experimental, McCarthy’s book represented, in Smith’s eyes, a way forward for the novel, as opposed to the “lyrical Realism” of Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel Netherland (a book Wood praised). Four years later, Smith took her first steps down that path, publishing NW, titled after the postcode of the London neighborhood in which it is set, the story of two girlhood friends and their diverging paths into adulthood. The book’s disciplined, semiexperimental structure and intimate focus have caused some people I’ve known to decree it her best novel, but they always seem to be the sort of readers who mistrust fiction that delivers too much pleasure. (Wood put it on his list of the best books of the year.) To me it seemed that some of the joy had seeped out of Smith’s work in her pursuit of the “moral seriousness” that Wood felt White Teeth lacked, and of the formal innovation that Remainder represented.
No wonder Smith turned to historical fiction, despite her long resistance to the genre—and to writing about Dickens. Here, too, she has chosen an unconventional format: Although The Fraud is divided into “volumes” like a Victorian novel, the chapters are short, with the chapter breaks occasionally coming in the middle of a scene. The narrative jumps around in time, a reflection of the aging Eliza’s ruminative, past-haunted mind. It is a mellower book than any of its predecessors, and its richness comes with Smith’s willingness to abide her main character’s many contradictions. Eliza has an acute understanding of her own lack of freedom, but she hopelessly romanticizes Bogle and the Black slaves she works to liberate. When she meets Black people who fail to conform to her image of noble sufferers, they disconcert her. She is capable of recognizing how ridiculous William is, but also how precious is his capacity for happiness. And she loves him.
William’s second wife, Sarah, a much younger former maidservant whom he has impregnated, is a great admirer of the Claimant, and much of The Fraud details the strange beliefs of what can only be called his fan base. Its members support him because they believe him to be one of them, despite the fact that he is claiming to be a baronet. As for his vulgar manners and apparent lack of education? Sarah explains,
Why, that’s exactly why we know it’s him. Let me ask you this: if you were a lowborn butcher pretending to be a Lord, wouldn’t you talk just so, and dress as you should, and mind all your ps and qs, and keep high company? Course you would. But our Sir Roger don’t bother with none of that. He is himself. He knows what he’s about. And we know him.
The contemporary political parallels are obvious, but at a later point in the novel, Sarah takes Eliza to her old neighborhood in Stepney to show her what actual poverty looks like. Who can untangle the knots a woman must tie in herself to survive there? The visit is a revelation confirming Eliza’s personal motto: “A person is a bottomless thing.” Or, as Smith likes to quote from one of the classic Hollywood movies she adores, The Philadelphia Story, “the time to make up your mind about people is never.” For all her flaws, Eliza goes on exploring.
Certainty is the enemy of humanism, but an openness to the ideas and experiences of others is its essence. If Smith weren’t the sort of artist willing to entertain Wood’s criticisms of White Teeth—a novel that, incidentally, very much holds up—she wouldn’t be the sort of author who could produce On Beauty, a radiant novel about a mixed-race American family embroiled in the culture wars of the late ’90s. She also wouldn’t have written NW, a book which left me cold, and then gone on to write the charming Swing Time. It is in her openness to and her endless curiosity about other people, even the ones she disagrees with, that her power lies. The Fraud may not revive the jostling energy of White Teeth—that would be too much of a concession to Dickens—but it feels free in a way Smith’s novels haven’t in a long time, as if she is once again wandering a path of her own choosing, shaped by her own unhindered desires. Think of it as an instruction manual for how to read our fellow human beings, and also how to read Zadie Smith: Always prepare for surprises, and never make up your mind.
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