Zadie Smith - N-W

Published: 2012

THIS IS THE STORY OF A CITY, announces the blurb on the inner jacket of N-W. Right, before we get on to anything else, it isn’t, particularly. Yes, it makes a well-worn point about the interconnected yet isolated nature of life in a city. “Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.” N-W may be set in and around the eponymous north western area of London – Zadie Smith has, so far, refused to recognise the existence of life in Britain outside of the M25 – yet the story could be taking place virtually anywhere. For a novel named after its geographical setting, this seems odd.

                If this seems like a slightly petulant criticism, that’s because I’m still annoyed at what a disappointment this book turned out to be, from a writer who I (not to mention the Granta list people) hold in high regard. The first novel of hers I came across was the sharp-witted campus novel On Beauty (2008). But it was her debut that really impressed me. White Teeth (2000) is one of those novels that so vividly portrays the era in which it was written that it is almost representative of it. An uplifting, multi-faceted portrait of contemporary multicultural Britain at the turn of the 21^st Century. It also showcased how she was equally adept at getting into the head of a sixty-something white male character as she was with a young, black, female character – all the more impressive, in my eyes, that she only in her twenties when she wrote it.

                N-W is similar to White Teeth in some superficial ways, in the sense that, like that novel, it is made up of several, loosely interwoven stories following characters that have taken very different paths in life. But there the similarity ends. Where White Teeth was poignant and funny, N-W is just depressing. The blurb describes it as a tragi-comic novel, but I couldn’t find much amusement in it. The characters are all either poor and unhappy, rich and unhappy, or happy but doomed to be knifed to death in a pointless street attack (apologies for the spoiler, but like most things in this novel, it really doesn’t have a whole lot of bearing on the story).

                So, we start off with Leah, whose husband wants children but she doesn’t, a conundrum she illicitly solves with the pill and abortions. She also gets taken advantage of by a door-to-door scam, and, it seems, in life generally. She seems like an interesting character, but after spending the first third of the book agonising about various issues and tempting us with a few interesting but un-followed-up storylines, her section is suddenly over and we join Felix: former alcoholic, jack-of-all-trades and current car mechanic.

                Felix grew up on the same estate as Leah (this is the common link throughout the book) and is a likeable, happy-go-lucky type. After some fairly aimless run-ins with his Rastafarian father and fallen aristrocratic mistress, time spent fucking in faded grandeur amid empty vodka bottles, he ends up getting on the wrong side of some local thugs and is knifed to death by some guys who say ‘blud’ a lot. Incidentally, this takes place on Leah’s street; this is the only other link between the two characters. It’s a pity, I was just starting to get to like Felix. It’s also a pity because he’s far more likeable than anyone else appearing in this book.

                Finally there’s Natalie, a black girl from the same estate who’s beaten the odds to become a rich, successful lawyer with a banker husband. Turns out she was childhood friends with Leah – they’re still in touch but now distant and resentful of each others’ existence. As an adult, she spends a lot of time agonising over her racial identity, as well as cheating on her husband with random strangers from an internet dating site for oblique reasons that are never really disclosed. In the end, of course, both Leah and Natalie’s dark secrets come to the attention of their respective partners, which is how Smith contrives to have both of them present at the book’s lukewarm climax, but by this point I didn’t really care what happened to any of them. Smith’s trademark, and usually enjoyable, unconventional literary devices  (not using speech marks, ending chapters mid sentence, etc) doesn’t help, either – here, it tips the balance from playfulness into pretentiousness.

                Maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe N-W really is a profound, “quietly devastating novel “(that blurb again) that cuts to the core of the modern condition of city life. It’s an overwhelmingly bleak novel , I’ll give it that. But whilst White Teeth had, well, teeth, N-W is just toothless. Or maybe Zadie Smith novels adhere to the same pattern that sci-fi fans say Star Trek movies do: one good one followed by one bad one. Well, if that’s the case, as least things bode well for her next work.