Book review: NW, by Zadie Smith

By Hannah McGill
Published on 26/08/2012 00:00

PLENTY of things about Zadie Smith were set to stun, or at the very least disarm, when she emerged into the literary mainstream with her first novel White Teeth in 2000.

She was 24 – an age at which, in a youth-fixated market, a quarter-million pound advance from a mighty publisher based on a single chapter will always pique curiosity, not to mention envy. Cambridge-educated, she spoke in the tones of the mainstream, but her mixed-race background (she’s half-Jamaican) and state comprehensive schooling made her representative of modern Britain’s confusion of class mobility and cultural mingling.

Those who like to complain that the British literary scene is wholly staked out and colonised by boarding school bluebloods tend to falter around Smith, not quite sure whether she’s part of the problem or part of the solution. Let’s face it, too, she’s nothing if not easy on the eye, and three-quarter-page portraits hardly hurt in establishing name recognition. (Not just for lady writers, either: check out pouty early publicity pictures of Martin Amis; or Truman Capote’s contention that early fuss around him was prompted by the “rather exotic” photograph of him that adorned his first collection.)

More interesting than all this image business, however, was the style and tone of White Teeth. Ambitious on the level of plot, but breezily straightforward in its mode of address, the book had a zingy confidence that suited its title. Not for Smith some navel-gazey, post-adolescent swither about drug experiences, university romances or, God forbid, trying to write your first novel.

Pained analysis of the human condition might be the assumed ambition of all literary writers, but as anyone who’s tried it knows, finding joy in life’s absurdities can be a tougher brief. Smith’s light sense of humour and fondness for ironic interjections and linguistic games went on to inform her next two novels, The Autograph Man and the American-set, Man Booker-shortlisted On Beauty, as well as her burgeoning career as an essayist and commentator (which has produced some of her finest writing). Whether she’s really a heavyweight remains a preoccupation of her critics, and has appeared to concern her too (“I don’t have the physical and mental will to be a great [novelist]…” she said in 2003, “I know what I’m not going to be now.”).

Some complained that Smith’s playful verbiage and hectic multiple perspectives represented a sort of distancing device, one capable of replacing true insight with what James Wood called “irrelevant intensity” about the minutiae of life.

NW is no less layered and laden with perky observations from multiple perspectives, and certainly much of its surface pleasure is derived from pop culture references and day-to-day comedic observations. But Smith, writing about her own neck of the woods and about people she seems to fully know and care for, feels warmly present in this work. If The Autograph Man’s celebrity-obsessed protagonist was too cartoon-quirky, and On Beauty’s characters had antecedents in the novel’s structural model, EM Forster’s Howard’s End, the four lead characters in NW feel freshly minted, persuasive and decisively Smith’s.

All are in their early thirties. Leah is a charity administrator adjusting to being married; Felix a mechanic with a tangled romantic life; Natalie, a barrister; and Nathan a teenage bad boy turned adult ne’er-do-well, who all grew up on the same estate in north- west London. The different paths their lives have taken reflect the complex social currents of modern Britain, and are reflected in their diverse communication styles. Leah’s nervy introspection, concern about being “bourgeois” and ambivalence about motherhood are exquisitely rendered, and Felix’s voice throbs with conviction – Smith’s evocation of his final, squalid sexual tryst with an eccentric ex-girlfriend is a tour-de-force of ordinary strangeness.

I must admit to losing focus somewhat when it came to Natalie, who orders her memories in neat, clever-headed paragraphs like a creative writing student – but whoever’s style you prefer, Smith is adept at identifying different ways in which intellect is channelled and ideas organised. The broken-up narrative does interrupt a smooth reading experience, which can frustrate; in effect it’s four linked short stories rather than one continuous narrative. And it’s hard not to want Leah and Felix back once they recede, so vividly are both established. But the book plays with this very desire on the reader’s part, asking us to reassess these characters as others’ perspectives on them emerge.

Throughout, the everyday tragedy of adult separation from our childhood lives and selves – and the shifts that separate us from the people who were once our intimates – looms large. The various guilty pressures that contribute to the formation of our identities – Leah comparing her own fortunes to those of a chaotic, rough girl from her neighbourhood; Leah’s old friend changing her birth name “Keisha” to the less culturally specific “Natalie”; Felix marshalling the assumptions routinely made about young black males – are also resonantly drawn.

Its mercurial style makes it more of a choppy, dippy read than a single absorbing narrative, but it is inventive, stimulating and poignant throughout its twists and turns. And I don’t doubt, for all Smith’s self-deprecation, that it took considerable physical and mental will.

Hamish Hamilton, £18.99