Zadie Smith's NW

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.