London NW calling
It’s been a long wait for a new novel by Zadie Smith. She’s been loudly lauded, and garlanded with prizes since her first novel, White Teeth, came out in 2000. Her last book, On Beauty, won the Orange prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker. That was six years ago.
Taking the London postcode, NW, as her landscape, Smith portrays life there in all its gore and glory. She’s not the first writer to try and expose London like a modern day Charles Dickens; Sebastian Faulks, for one, tried it in A Week In December. But Smith’s London might be a million miles from Faulks’s exposé of the chattering classes.
Best friends from childhood, Leah and Keisha are desperate to escape their roots. They grew up in Caldwell, a council estate in Willesden, but both achieved university, and, if they want them, can have bright futures. Keisha is the more ambitious. Changing her name to Natalie, she becomes a barrister, and is tipped to be an early QC. Well married, she has two children, a beautiful house and a sparkling social life. Whilst envying her, Leah feels she barely knows her friend anymore.
The book’s opening section focuses on Leah, now in her 30s. A gentle girl, she’s happy with Michel, an African French hairdresser; but there’s an apathy about her. The opening section, where she’s conned out of money by an old schoolmate who has fallen into drugs, is characteristic. But why is she so determined not to have children?
I was really enjoying getting acquainted with Leah, when the following section kicked in with a bang. Felix, a former drug dealer, is trying his very best to reform. Clean, and in love with Grace, he visits a lover, Annie, to tie up the ends of his old life. Hilarious, yet vulnerable, Annie says her father and twin brother used to call her, ‘the afterbirth’. Annie teases Felix for trying to be the good guy. And ultimately, it is his goodness that proves his tragedy.
Zadie Smith isn’t afraid to take risks. The longest section of the book, told from Natalie’s point of view, takes Natalie and Leah from their childhood, through college and marriage to the present, and it’s done in a series of sketches. 184 of them.
For the most part this works brilliantly. This style really suited Natalie’s staccato progress to success. But by the end of the section, the structure started to get in the way of the story. By the time Natalie’s life starts to implode, on an unlikely plot line, I had started to lose my patience with both the character, and with her creator. That’s a shame. Because there’s brilliance here too. By and large, Smith has succeeded in writing a wide ranging, metropolitan novel.
