Fully Accountable

There is A Moment in Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW (2012), when Leah Hanwell, one of four protagonists whose lives it charts into their thirties, rehearses a work orientation speech (or it may be a regular pep talk) given by Adina, her “Team Leader” at a council lottery-fund distribution center in North West London. “The decision-making is obviously about relatability and yeah, empathy, and a personal connection but it’s also about follow-through and visibility in the sense of value for money, that we get to be conscious of via a process of paperwork. Paperworkpaperworkpaperwork. In the current climate every i has to be dotted and every t crossed so when I am put in a position, as Team Leader, by the people upstairs I can say: yup, fully accountable. Here’s x, y and z, fully accountable. Not splitting the atom, ladies, I should hope.”¹ Quite what the tone and the direction, or directions, of irony are is a nice question. Stylistically speaking, Adina and Leah know that they are in hoc to managerial cliché, the lingua franca of public accountability where “relatability and empathy,” “followthrough and visibility” have recently joined older familiars—dotted “i”s and crossed “t”s, the by now semianachronistic “paperwork.” The passage makes fittingly heavy play with Adina’s conflicted view of her managerial role: her eagerness to present herself as one of the team (“we get to be conscious”), not among those “upstairs” who are the dictators of due process despite her evident aspiration to their authority (“In the current climate …”). Leah’s attitude to the managerial pressure from above toward scrupulous “visibility” is, presumably, more skeptical but it’s hard to tell. “Not splitting the atom, ladies” may be a caustic elaboration, tantamount to a question from Leah—“why are you aping the patronizing sexism of an old-style male manager?”—or it may be Adina’s own closing bid at straddling the office power divide, declaring an obligatory suspicion of bureaucratic authority while enjoining obedience. The extent to which the office workers apprehend themselves to be participating in a comedy is moot. Certainly Adina’s claim to ironic distance on the language she employs (“yeah, empathy,” “Paperworkpaperworkpaperwork”) contributes to the mockumentary flavor of the whole, irony being no guarantee that others won’t recognize an apparatchik. We are closer to Ricky Jervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office, in short, than to Joseph Heller or Franz Kafka.²

In identifying as the tone of public-sector accounting today an uneasy concoction of pragmatism, cynicism, comedy, and resentment, Smith puts her finger on the complex spirit in which recipients of UK public funding, including university academics, have responded to the burden of reporting to government on the social benefits returned to the public. If that seems something of a step—from the lottery distribution office to the university—it’s one NW encourages its reader to make. Before thinking harder about it implications, I want to take a preliminary hint from Smith’s representation of dual demands, empathy and visibility, relatability and accountability, shaping the process of demonstrating “value for money” in today’s public sector: namely, the suggestion that there is a comparison waiting to be drawn out here between recent economic efforts at more qualitatively sensitive accounting and the much longer-standing aims and procedures of literary realism.

This essay takes that suggestion seriously. There is, I argue, a partial but telling resemblance between efforts in public sector management today to produce detailed qualitative as well as quantitative descriptions of the social benefits achieved with public funding, and the aspirations of realist fiction writers to get beyond representation of the external features of a society to the psychological and moral experiences that might yield a deeper valuation of it. Like literary realism, though operating within much stricter procedural limits, accounting for social “outcomes,” and especially social benefits, arbitrates between competing formal imperatives: “personal connection” and procedural “follow-through,” showing the capacity to relate psychologically and emotionally to others but respecting the obligation to render a clear and accurate account. The social-benefit accountant responds, as does any...