I showed up late to the Zadie Smith party. I don’t know why that is. Given my reading habit and the way I indulge my bookish pursuits, you’d think I’d notice when an amazing new voice appears on the horizon (I authorize you to sort out that mixed metaphor any way you please). Maybe it has something to do with the fact that, at the time of her first novel’s publication in 2000, I was wearing provincial CanLit blinkers and refused to read anything that hadn’t been supported by the Canada Arts Council. Maybe not. The more probable explanation is that we’d just bought a dog and a mini-van and had two kids who insisted we run them from soccer practice to gymnastics to cello lessons. Children almost strangled my reading habit and I was forced to defer my literary explorations for a few years. Now I sit in that blessed (possibly fleeting) space where my children are adults but not adult enough to have families of their own and our parents are older but not old enough to require our support. For now, my time is my own and I use at least some of it to catch up on my reading.
Time
Writing about NW ten years after its publication, I feel no compunction to treat this as a review. There is none of the urgency that comes with an ARC and a deadline. If I did treat this as a review, I might begin by describing the story. For example: this is the story of two girls, Leah Hanwell and Keisha Blake growing up in the Willesden area of northwest London with its NW postal code (hence the title of the novel). However, even if this were a conventional review, such a statement wouldn’t make much sense because the story doesn’t proceed according to the ordinary dictates of time. At first, I couldn’t say quite why this is so; it’s just a feeling I had. After all, apart from a “framing” incident in which a grifter named Shar dupes Leah out of some cash, the novel’s events progress more or less in chronological order. Girls from immigrant families grow up impoverished in a northwest London housing development. I don’t know the correct terminology for this particular social arrangement; every city calls it something different, but it comes down to the same thing: a place for the dominant group to warehouse not-so-dominant groups. The girls struggle against their circumstances and one of them, Keisha (whom we can be forgiven for taking as a Zadie Smith avatar), becomes a barrister and gains sufficient social mobility that her past does not determine her future. Yay, Keisha!
Only after some reflection can I say why the story doesn’t proceed according to the ordinary dictates of time. While I can trace the linear progression of events, there is something missing in their telling. There is no sense of a causal relationship between what precedes and what follows. Literary carrion have sucked out all the connective tissue and left behind the novel’s bare bones. That image may be too harsh. How about something more palatable? Smith presents scenes as if they were snap shots in a photo album. Taken in isolation, no one shot appears related to any other. But if we view them in rapid succession, they come together to create the illusion of motion, as we might see with a flip book or a magic lantern. This is most obvious in the section titled “Host” which presents 185 vignettes. It falls to the reader to trace a causally connected path through the vignettes.
This is reinforced by the novel’s grammar, in particular, the relative paucity of conjunctions. Smith avoids the comfort of continuity that we normally expect in the interstices between one thought and the next. If you were to run NW through a conjunction counting algorithm and compare the results with a standard sample, I expect you’d find that NW scores quite low on the conjunction quotient. Let’s try an experiment. Here are the opening lines of NW:
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lamp posts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
It goes on in much the same manner. Now compare this to a novelist who is touted as a consummate prose stylist. From the first page of The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes:
We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet…
Both writers have something to tell us about time. But both deploy grammar to different ends as they deliver their respective messages. Barnes offers us a sense of flow. Each succeeding sentence builds upon the one that went before. This suggests something about the nature of time. Call it white time, if you like; time for the upper middle classes. By contrast, Smith presents a choppier prose. If Barnes is Highland Park, Smith is Laphraoig. She hits the back of the throat like a clod of peat. Flow. Continuity. Smooth progressions. These are luxuries you won’t find in NW. Here, you find characters who stand outside time. Take Nathan Bogle, for example, a school mate who grew up not far from the girls. Any time we meet him, he seems lost, a little stoned, and utterly changeless. Towards the end of the novel, there is a hint that he might play Fagin to a group of women, including Shar, who scammed Leah at the outset. Even Keisha, who appears to have achieved escape velocity, finds herself circling back to the old neighbourhood. She may have overstated things when she asserted that her past does not determine her future. Her life may not follow a smooth trajectory after all. The fixity of an impoverished childhood may still have a grip on Keisha that pulls her back to the place where she started. Perhaps not so coincidentally, a Wikipedia entry informs us that in 2020 Zadie Smith moved back to Kilburn, in the NW6 postal code area in London.
Imagery
Reading NW as a series of snapshots is not such a stretch. Here and there, Zadie Smith offers confirmation of this reading. The first such confirmation comes early in the novel when Leah, arguing with her mother and wishing to avoid any more unpleasantness, steps out into the garden where the upstairs neighbour, an incidental character named Ned, lies on the communal hammock. He lies with an old Leica on his stomach, waiting for the sunset, “for the sunsets in this part of the world are strangely vivid.” “A serious smoker, time congeals around him. Simple things take on a stretched-out significance. It seems to Leah that he has been twenty-eight since they met, ten years ago.” Again with the time.
Concerns about time and about images are not really separate concerns. We use images in quick succession to produce the illusion of temporal flow. Conversely, we present an image in isolation as a way to stop the flow of time. A solitary image can do violence to time. It can colonize time. It can wrench time from the fabric of the universe.
Another character who grew up with Leah, Keisha, and Nathan is Felix. In one scene, he arrives at his father’s place, such as it is, to deliver a package, a hard-covered book that cost an exorbitant twenty-nine quid. GARVEY HOUSE: A Photographic Portrait. The photo book documents life in the residence, described as a mix of “squat, halfway house and commune” where the father lived when he was Felix’s age and where he lives to this day. We rifle through the pages with Felix and the language proceeds accordingly. One image. Another image. No apparent connection between the two. Except of course that both images come from the same community. Again with the choppy prose and the absolute absence of conjunctions.
A few pages later, Smith drops us into a scene where Felix meets up with a white boy named Tom who’s trying to unload a beater, a project car, something Felix can buy cheap and fix up. It’s difficult to say which boy is more full of shit as the two talk themselves up to each other. Felix hints that he’s done some film work and Tom answers that he has a cousin who’s a VP at Sony. Tom, who is 25, goes on like he’s a veteran of the industry: “’I’m very interested in film — I used to dabble a bit in all that, you know, the way narrative works, how you can tell a story through images …’” If we haven’t taken up Smith’s clues by now, then there’s no hope for us.
Body
There are matters of time, but there are also matters of space, most notably the space we occupy with our bodies. Bits about embodiment lie strewn throughout the novel. For example, we have this observation: “Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language.” It calls to mind the idea that a book is embodied language. To the extent that we readers grip this book and feel its tactile solidity, we collude in the embodiment of the story it relates. As voracious readers, maybe we want to possess the novel the way the sexually ravenous want to possess a body. (Or maybe I’m just getting carried away with myself.)
Embodiment in NW is more problematic (than for a middle-aged white man like me) because all the bodies in it are racialized bodies. Keisha and her mixed race husband are out for dinner with friends and we have this observation: “They were all four of them providing a service for the rest of the people in the café, simply by being here. They were the ‘local vibrancy’ to which the estate agents referred. For this reason, too, they needn’t concern themselves much with politics. They simply were political facts, in their very persons.”
Keisha (or perhaps Smith; it’s hard to say which) takes the fact of her materiality as a scandal. While Zadie Smith is not a notably religious person, her writing is not without intimations of spiritual depth, and so I would not be too hasty to dismiss the possibility that her use of the word scandal here is deliberate. It creates an echo with the Koine word skandalon which has been translated into English language Christian theology as the scandal of the cross, a reflection upon the apparent absurdity of the divine choice to assume fleshly form and all the inconvenience that goes along with that choice including pain, disease, suffering, and death.
Not surprisingly, death visits the novel’s characters. In a domestic scandal of materiality, Keisha’s husband has caught her out as she carries on casual sexual encounters with other men. Unsure what comes next, she wanders through her old haunts and her friend, Nathan, talks her down from the edge of a bridge. He has drawn her from the brink of death, but we later discover that their mutual friend, Felix, has died in an attack. Smith is not explicit about it, but we are given to believe that Nathan had something to do with the homicide. Perhaps the greatest scandal of our bodies is the finality of their undoing.
Not all embodiment is enfleshment. NW, the postal district, is an embodiment of sorts, too, a physical space where communities and cultures find their being. And like fleshly bodies, it has its own scandal. It has its own vulnerabilities and pains, and is equally mortal. That is a fact that the global pandemic has driven home: those communities throughout the world that most resemble NW are most susceptible to the stresses that Covid-19 has precipitated. Politicians go on with their triumphal narratives about resilience and fortitude, but everybody knows those qualities are easier to find in communities with more resources.
See other Nouspique posts on Zadie Smith:
Zadie Smith’s Reliance on Negative Capability in Feel Free – May 17, 2022
Zadie Smith and Intimations of “Real Suffering” – July 30, 2020
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith – June 3, 2020