Wounded Realism

For over a decade now, Zadie Smith has been changing her mind about the kind of novel she wants to write.¹ This mutability leaves readers with at least two options when a new work arrives. Either you expect to delight in the sheer ingenuity with which it refuses to be anything like its predecessors, or you experience a kind of tantalizing anticipation as you wonder whether Smith has finally gotten into her stride by writing the sort of novel she's always wanted to write. Sandwiched between these reactions lurks a rather glum alternative that might be called reluctant disappointment: you genuinely want to admire this latest venture, you're ready to be enthralled once again by Smith's knack for handling social bric-a-brac and architectonic scale (White Teeth), or by her rhetorical polish and ethical profundity (On Beauty), but you have to admit that this new novel appears to be attempting so much, on so many formal and thematic fronts, that it can't decide what it wants to be. This, at least, is how I found myself thinking about NW—at first.

What gave me pause, what made me hesitant about being disenchanted for too long, is that Smith is trying very hard indeed. Every page of NW exudes the earnestness of her will-to-experiment. It's a modernist gesture of sorts, something that the more sympathetic reviewers noted. What connects this novel with Smith's earlier work is that she is once again aligning herself with a predecessor: with On Beauty, it was Forster; now it's Joyce. Indeed, if NW appears unable to figure out what kind of creature to become, the same could be said of Ulysses. Smith implied as much four years ago, arguing that "if literary realism survived the assault of Joyce, it retained the wound."² This assertion—arriving midway through her well-known essay "Two Directions for the Novel"—is angled as pointedly toward Smith herself as toward those who assume that in fiction today there are no remnants of modernism and that realism reigns unchallenged. It's no coincidence, then, that "Two Directions for the Novel" owns a strikingly predictive relationship to NW. In what follows, I want to revisit some of the concerns Smith raised in that review—concerns she took so personally that they've resulted in her changing her mind over the sort of writing that might "shake the novel out of its present complacency" by reopening that quintessentially Joycean "wound" ("Two Directions" 93).

Despite its reputation for being emblematic of a new wave of multicultural and migrant fiction, Smith's work has always been distinctly localized. Though set on opposite sides of the pond, White Teeth and On Beauty both work from quotidian, domestic spheres outward. Such is Smith's "militant particularism," as David Harvey might label it, an interest in local places as sites for the struggle toward an unromanticized and, for that reason, potentially durable cosmopolitan vision.³ NW is a continuation of this endeavor. According to its designer, Jon Gray, even the book's cover, in the U.K. edition, is intended "to look very English and be particularly representative of London."⁴ If NW's jazzy jacket is "bold, simple and eye-catching," as Gray hoped, the first pages give a taste of a narrative that boldly catches the eye, for sure, but is not always simple to follow. The plot opens with an everyday—and again, domestically framed—scene, as the volatile Shar pleads for help at the Willesden doorstep of the thirty-something Leah Hanwell. The emergency (a quick cash loan for Shar to catch a taxi to see her supposedly hospitalized mother) turns out to be a scam, costing Leah £30 but entwining the two women for the rest of the novel.

In a following section we move through Soho to chart the fate of a recovering addict, the endearing Felix Cooper, as he bids a final farewell to a former lover. After reprimanding...