Zadie Smith with her mother, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, a Jamaican woman.
"All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or
Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline,
essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in
Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team
being Nigerian where once they were Irish, or at least Pauline judges
them to be Nigerian, and they're perfectly fine as long as you keep an
eye on them every minute. Leah puts her thumbnail to her wedding ring.
Pushes the band hard."
Zadie Smith's latest novel,
NW, alluding to northwestern London's Willesden, Kilburn, and other neighborhoods where the author grew up, is a tough egg to crack. Unlike
White Teeth, I see as more humorous and accessible,
NW focuses on 4 different individuals who grew up in the same council estate and, with great detail, changes in narrative structure, and Smith's attempts to make this process seamless, show how the lives of 4 individuals in their 30s intersect. Think of the novel as
White Teeth but grown up. In fact, I am quite sure there are allusions to characters from
White Teeth in
NW, such as Mrs. Iqbal and Irie. Unsurprisingly, this London novel's characters' community possesses a looming presence in the plot, which actually made it difficult to follow since I am not familiar with the London sights or neighborhood Smith so fondly writes of. Like
White Teeth, the novel focuses on 'multiracial' contemporary London, with the Irish-descended Leah, the Jamaicans, Keisha/Natalie and Felix, and a St. Lucian, Nathan Bogle. Their loved ones and significant others are also a diverse crew, with multiracial individuals, working-class folks, and other denizens of the cosmopolitan city known as London while the lives of the aforementioned four individuals take drastic turns and each one is forced to think about why they are and what they are.
This novel asks more of the reader than
White Teeth. The novel is divided into 4 sections covering the lives of Nathan Bogle, Keisha/Natalie Blake, Leah Hanwell, and Felix and the narrative structure or format changes for each. Beginning with Leah, the novel uses stream of consciousness and then more conventional formats for the other three sections of the text. This novel, however, seems to have been better constructed as a collection of short stories rather than a novel, especially because the two female characters, Leah and her childhood friend, Keisha Blake, receive a disproportionate amount of time while the black men, Nathan and Felix, receive considerably less time in the plot. Thus, this novel could have been better constructed as a a short story or two revolving around Leah and Keisha's friendship and disillusionment with life. However, Smith's nearly seamless writing connects the men to the women thematically based on angst, disappoint with adult life, and the adult struggle for self-definition not limited to societal expectations based on race, class, and gender. Furthermore, Smith critiques notions of professionalization as the key to life, to escaping poverty. Keisha, who renames herself Natalie in college, and then becomes a barrister, ends up right back in her community of impoverished working-class Londoners. And despite her education, her professional career, she could only escape poverty in the end by marrying a wealthy biracial man, Frank, and then living through a loveless marriage, an impoverished family, and a myriad of problems in a quest to find the clarity of life. However, at the end of the novel, the ultimate message on how to attain that clarity, that understanding of self and others, is still disappointingly depicted in such an odd way: Natalie calls the police to inform them of Nathan's possible role in a murder of another character. It creates many more
Nevertheless, Smith's novel, though falling short of her first, is an interesting read. It contains several references to pop culture, television, hip-hop,
The Wire, Amy Winehouse, and life in 21st century London. Oddly, however, Smith does not include the Tottenham Riots or other pressing issues affecting contemporary London. As usual, however, she maintains her sense of humor and deprecation in her characters, whose conceptions of the world reveal the contradictions within all of us, especially regarding popular culture, marital infidelity, slang, and how people perceive life, as if there is a set path and it includes a profession, marriage, and children. Moreover, she is willing and able to deliver humorous punches at her character's naivete, limited perception of the human condition, and race in the UK, which has many parallels with the US. For instance, Leah, who marries a gorgeous Afro-French man, Michel, of Algerian and Guadeloupean heritage, is despised and talked about by her mostly black co-workers because she's seen as a white woman stealing "one of their men." Frank, or Franco De Angelis, the half-Trinidadian, half-wealthy Italian, also represents crisis of identity so commonly seen mixed black-white individuals, wanting to embrace a "blackness" that he does not know or have any connections to and thereby coming off as inauthentic and never free from his identity crisis or awareness of his class privilege.
Overall, a worthy read and Smith's shortest novel so far. Though difficult to follow at times, and loaded with subtle philosophical statements on life in modern London,
NW succeeds in creating two developed female characters whose relationship enchants, intrigues and speaks to the reader. The central characters' friendship is repaired but there are no clear articulations or obvious answers, so the ending is far from comforting since the lives of the two women are still unclear. Regardless of the somewhat weak (and in my opinion, confusing conclusion) ending, Smith's experimental use of language, her "hysterical irony" and the novel's emphasis on the multiracial folks of Northwest London, make it worth reading.
Here are some great moments in the novel:
1. "Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside
from her father. And then of course they had been surprised by their own
conventionality. The marriage pleased Pauline. It calmed the anxieties
of Michel's family. It was pleasing to please their families."
2. "On Saturday mornings Michel helps the ladies and gentlemen of NW look
right for their Saturday nights, look fresh and correct, and there, in
the salon, he is free to blast his treacly R&B, his oh baby oh
shorty till six in the mawnin' till the break a' dawn."
3. "People back home, they don't get me at all. I'm too advanced for them.
So when they try to contact me, I don't let this--I don't let drama in
my life like that. No way! I've worked too hard."
4. "Former prison guard, social worker, local councilor. How did she get
anything done with those talons? Long and curved and painted with
miniature renderings of the Jamaican flag. Clawed her way up through the
system. Born and bred. Is wary of those, like Leah, whose degrees have
thus installed them. To Adina a university degree is like a bungee cord,
lowering in and pulling out with dangerous velocity. Of course, you
won't be here long. Look, I don't want to give you projects you're not
going to be here to finish..."
5. "Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling
posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life,
more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself
anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a
concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea
reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the
jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a
minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An
unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the
purpose of preparing for a life never intended for her?? Years too
disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh's dour
hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky
chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a
two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid
Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class,
sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles
passionately around it. Great fiery arcs, long pointed shadows."
6. "Although Leah has a blue tongue and a fancy degree and a hot husband
and no offense, but for the women in our community, in the
Afro-Caribbean community, no offense, but when we see one of our lot
with someone like you it's a real issue. It's just a real issue that you
should be aware of. No offense. (Brighton weekend, team-building
exercise, hotel bar, 2004.)"
7. "In the corridor the women spill out of every room, into the heat, cocoa
buttered, ready for a warm night out on the Edgware Road. From St.
Kitts, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, in their
forties, fifties, sixties, and yet busts and butts and shiny legs and
arms still open to the sexiness of an early summer in a manner that the
women of Leah's family can never be. For them the sun is fatal. So red,
so pale."
8. "Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had
previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to
destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's
parents. At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees
ten-years-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had
inside her at the same age."
9. "Pauline turns the page with vilence. The windo logs Kilburn's skyline.
Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. here bust
is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings
rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy piggledy
rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags
in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37.
In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once--houses,
churches, schools, cemeteries--an optimistic vision of Metroland."
10. "One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty."
11. "Felix sighed and leaned back into his bench and began murmuring. God
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to
change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
12. "Felix, listen: you can't buy a woman. You can't buy her love. She's
gonna leave you that way. Love's gonna leave you anyway so you might as
well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious."
13. "Life's not a videogame, Felix--there aren't a certain number of points
that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level.
The bad news is everyone dies at the end. Game over."
14. "It had never occurred to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was
in possession of a particular type of personality. Like most children,
theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a
person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake
was willing and available to do."
15. "When being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you
read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon
found that being bullied was practically a sign of superior personality,
and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to
be avenged at the end of life, when qualities of the kind Keisha Blake
possessed--cleverness, will-to-power--became "their own reward," and
that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the
movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and
historical universe, and--had they ever met you--would very likely have
enslaved you or, at best, bullied you to precisely the same extent as
Lorna Mackenzie who had a problem with the way you acted like you were
better than everyone else."
16."For precisely this reason Keisha has always been wary of Rodney and
keen to avoid him--as much as that was possible in a place like
Caldwell--on the principle that the last thing a drowning person needs
is another drowning person clinging to them."
17. "We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of
thinking," read Rodney, and then made a note by this sentence: "So what?
(fallacious argument.)"
18. "There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route."
19. "When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis--she was not
the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility--she said
that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused
and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between
them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis--
or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis--could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?"
20. "Perhaps sex isn't the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of
language. The gestures themselves are limited--there are only so many
places for so many things to go--and Rodney was in no way deficient
technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank's silly, uncontrolled,
unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a
bedroom."
21.On Frank: "He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside
from the old nostalgic affection for 90s hip hop. The idea of the
Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he
preferred to think of Africa--"Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the
Sphinx"--where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient
stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.)"
22. "A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural."
23. Reference to The Wire:
"Everyone in both Natalie's
workplace and Frank's was intimately involved with the lives of a group
of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of
crack in the scrub between a concatenation of terribly designed tower
blocks in a depressed and forgotten city with one of the highest murder
rates in the United States. That everyone should be so intimately
involved in the lives of these young men annoyed Frank, though he could
not really put his finger on why, and in protest he exempted himself and
his wife from what was by all accounts an ecstatic communal televisual
experience."
24. "She wanted to give her friend something of equal value in return. If
candor were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if
it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect
gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and
ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or
prettification. But Natalie Blake's instinct for self-defense,
self-preservation, was simply too strong."
25. "Through the glass doors they watched the children spinning in the lawn.
Leah found the number online. Natalie dialed it. It was Keisha who did
the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket,
the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the
two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and
always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed
together over a handset. "I got something to tell you," said Keisha
Blake, disguising her voice with her voice."
Zadie Smith with her father at 5 years old.
