We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
N.W. means North-West London and when a
novel has a geographical location presented assertively as its title, it is
reasonable to suppose that the author intends some sort of social comment on
the place. So it proves with Zadie Smith’s latest. N.W. follows the lives of three or four Londoners who all come from
the same London N.W. estate.
Leah
Hanwell is a white woman in her early thirties, married to a French-African.
She’s come to the point in her marriage where her husband really wants
children, but she herself is still clinging to the hedonistic image she had of
herself when she was younger - the banality of copulation without reproduction,
the cult of youth and the attempt to pretend that we don’t age and that the
biological clock isn’t ticking away relentlessly. As Zadie Smith puts it in one
of the sort-of stream-of-consciousness monologues she gives to Leah:
“To be very objective about it, it is the
woman’s fault that they never discussed children. For some reason it had never
occurred to her that all this endless and wondrous screwing was heading towards
a certain, perfectly obvious destination. She fears the destination. Be
objective! What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age.
Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen
and if I do nothing I will stand still nothing will change I will be
eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I will never die. Very banal this
fear. Everybody has it these days. What else? She is happy enough in the moment
they are in. She feels she deserves exactly what she has, no more, no less. Any
change risks fatally upsetting this balance. Why must the moment change?”
(Pg.22)
Leah and her
Irish mother and her family are defined in this novel by the wider community
they inhabit, now very definitely multi-cultural and as Caribbean as it is
ancestrally British.
One of
Leah’s old school-friends is the Jamaican Felix. He takes up the second section
of the novel, which Zadie Smith chops up with precise geographical markers
indicating which parts of London each piece of narrative is set. NW6, W1 and so
on. Also in his early 30s, Felix is a former small-time drug-dealer who has
dabbled in those ephemeral things that young people think are glamorous, such
as being an errand boy on film sets and pretending he is part of the film
industry. He now wants to grow up, settle down and have kids. But his
environment doesn’t help him. When he visits his father, he finds a
dope-smoking old man who still thinks he is part of the cutting edge of
consciousness because he spouts late hippie slogans. He visits the pathetic
white woman Annie, posh heir to a decaying estate, still doped in her forties,
still attempting to party and refusing to recognise that her life is going
nowhere.
If Leah
wants time to stand still and let her remain a kid, Felix desperately wants
time to reach some sort of fulfilment, but he is thwarted for various reasons –
not least his own weaknesses which keep him in the dopey environment. Its not
unreasonable to see ageing and the encroachment of a genuinely adult
consciousness as one of the novel’s main concerns.
But N.W. is at its sharpest and most
readable when it reaches the third and longest section. Divided into brief and
sometimes bite-sized observations and episodes, we are given the life story of
Leah Hanwell’s best friend from school, the Jamaican Keisha Blake, who has
apparently achieved all the things her proud parents and community wanted her
to. She has been to university, adjusted to its residual snobberies, qualified
as a lawyer and learnt how to get on in what is still largely a male and white
profession. She even seems to have negotiated the problem of balancing career and
home life – after a little initial resistance to the idea, she and her West
Indian-Italian husband have produced a family.
Unfortunately,
all this comes at the price of a raging identity crisis. Zadie Smith doesn’t
put it as starkly as I am doing here, but basically the successful Keisha – who
has re-made herself under the name Natalie – realizes that in succeeding as a
professional, she has totally alienated herself from the values of the
community in which she grew up. When she looks at the clothes she wears for
various occasions, Keisha-Natalie reflects:
“Daughter
drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag.
British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when
considering these various attitudes, she struggled to think what would be most
authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.” [Pg.245]
There are
another couple of characters who recur in this novel – I haven’t mentioned the
more shady Nathan Bogle – but you will understand from this what the basic
structure of N.W. is. Three or four
lives are interwoven to take the pulse of a whole community.
There are
some things that Zadie Smith does extremely well. She can enter into the
consciousness of her minor characters by letting us hear the way they think.
Here, for example, are the dated prejudices of Leah’s old mother Pauline as she
tries to adjust to a non-white community:
“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 are 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….” (Pg.15)
Zadie Smith
can also capture the collective stream-of-consciousness, as in this account of
a journey across part of the city:
“Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab,
exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock, 98, 16, 32, standing room only – quicker to
walk! Escapees from St Mary’s, Paddington: expectant father smoking, old lady
wheeling herself in a wheelchair smoking, die-hard holding urine sack, blood
sack, smoking. Everybody loves fags. Everybody. Polish paper. Turkish paper,
Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your
(stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses,
three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. Casino. Everybody
believes in destiny!.....” (Pg.34)
The
micro-communities she creates are micro-communities with a believable
self-consciousness, as in this sketch of one of the law-firms for which
Keisha-Natalie works:
“At RSN
Associates the law burst from broken box files, it lined the hallways, bathroom
and kitchen. This chaos was unavoidable, but it was also to some extent an
aesthetic, slightly exaggerated by the tenants, and intended to signify
selflessness, sincerity. Natalie saw how her clients found the chaos
comforting, just as the fake Queen Anne sofas and painted foxhounds of the
Middle Temple reassured another type of client. If you worked here it would
only be for the love of the law. Only real do-gooders could possibly be this
poor…. Wins were celebrated in-house with cheap plonk, pita bread and hummus.
When an RSN solicitor came to see you in your cell, they arrived by bus.”
(Pg.215)
The novel
is certainly panoramic and it is understandable that some have seen it as being
in line of descent from the great state-of-London novels. To her credit Zadie
Smith does not spell out time-specific cultural references (she lets readers
get them for themselves) although it is possible that the novel will be best
appreciated by those who know London well.
She also
makes her stabs at symbolism unobtrusive. The novel’s epigraph is the familiar
medieval jungle from the Peasants’ Revolt “When
Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?” - that is, a reminder that social class is an entirely artificial construct. It
is not until we get to Page 190 that we have a direct reference to this
epigraph and its social context when Natalie, becoming a lawyer, imagines
history with “bloody peasants burning
lawbooks.”
Early in
the novel, there is an extended image of an overgrown church with a vandalised
graveyard. Late in novel we are told that the apartment blocks on the tatty
estate where the protagonists live are all named after materialist and
rationalist philosophers - Smith, Locke,
Bentham, Hume, Russell. Zadie Smith doesn’t milk either image, but seems to be
implying that two distinct received philosophies (Christianity and rationalist
humanism) aren’t up to fixing the problems of N.W.
Unfortunately,
for all its vibrancy and colour, there is much in this novel that jars. Nostalgie de la boue is one implicit
theme as Keisha-Natalie, the novel’s most interesting character, tries to deal
with her identity crisis and re-immerse herself in the community of her birth.
But the way Zadie Smith resolves this character’s problems is improbable,
melodramatic, slightly pornographic and a bit of a cop-out. I accept that
casual drug-use and casual sex are parts of the communities that Zadie Smith is
depicting. In this instance, however, it tips over into the sensationalist and
is ridiculously out of keeping with the character Smith has built up. It is an
act of desperation from a novelist who isn’t very good at resolutions.
Even more
difficult to take is the novel’s awkward narrative structure. Eventually we are
given a coherent connection between the lives of Leah, Natalie, Felix and
Nathan; but for most of the novel the links are arbitrary rather than
necessary. Certainly it is established early that Leah and Natalie are friends.
Even so, the result is more in the nature of three or four separate stories
than a satisfying whole.
Zadie Smith
hails from a North-West London environment like the one in the novel, had an
English father and a Jamaican mother and was educated at the University of
Cambridge. There is doubtless much that is autobiographical in N.W. – especially in the character of
Natalie - and the novel’s cityscapes and impressions of the community are
convincing. But with the clunky and unresolved plotting, this ends as a book of
brilliant but disconnected bits. It evokes without touching.
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