Lost in London Without a Compass:

With NW, Zadie Smith Takes a

Wrong Turn
You really can't go home again.
By Eric Banks • 09/04/12 7442pm

books

At the recent Edinburgh Literary Festival, Zadie

Smith announced that her 2005 novel On Beauty
would be her last to be set in America.
Henceforth, she was returning in her books to
her native England. A surprising thought, at least
at first. Wouldnʼt it seem natural that Ms. Smith,
a Greenwich Village familiar over the past several
years who holds tenure at NYU and has become
a mainstay in the pages of The New York Review
of Books, might have adopted New York as her
literary home as well? Nevertheless, in her
Ms. Smith. gangly, formally ambitious new novel, NW, she
has opted to make her return not just to London,
but to the working-class hodgepodge of Northwest London, the subject
of her 2000 novel White Teeth, as well as her childhood home.

Thirteen years on, it is still relatively familiar territory. While NW evinces

the authorʼs restlessness over how to get the tangled bustle of gritty
urban life down on the page, the chunk of the city where a good bit of the
novel takes place has remained buffeted from the real-estate juggernaut
that has transfigured much of London and New York over the past two
decades. As her character Leah Hanwell—at 35 years old a denizen of
the ʼhood who never moved up and out—pictures it from the window of a
bus:
 Ungentrified, ungentrifable. Boom and bust never come here. Here
bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-
streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy
piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly,
shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating
Willesden … In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at
once—houses, churches, schools, cemeteries—an optimistic vision of
Metroland. Little terraces, faux-Tudor piles. All the mod cons! Indoor
toilet, hot water. Well-appointed country living for those tired of the
city. Fast forward. Disappointed city living for those tired of their
countries.

Though they share the same vintage, Willesdenʼs faux-Tudors are a far
cry from the real-estate lottery tickets that line the street of John
Lancasterʼs Capital, the other much anticipated and mostly disappointing
way-we-live-now novel of London to arrive on our shores this year. Nor
has the precipitous bust of 2008–2009, a centerpiece of Mr. Lancasterʼs
book, left nearly the same mark on the main players of NW, although one
of the three strivers around whom the book revolves, the desperately
successful corporate lawyer Natalie, couldnʼt imagine the buff prosperity
of her life—a well-to-do banker husband, a modest manor on the park,
dinner parties with the sorts of insufferably self-regarding friends who
chatter about farm-to-table spinach and underwater birthing, two
children who seem destined never to know their motherʼs dismally
impoverished upbringing—without the tidal surge of the decadeʼs slosh
of wealth.

Natalie and her childhood friend Leah are the focal points of NW. The
novel traces their respective varieties of disappointed city living, from
their unpromising origins in council housing to their present-day
unhappiness on either side of the have-and-have-not divide. A former
philosophy student whose life has rutted out in a dead-end
administrative job for the council, Leah is married to Michel, a French
hairdresser of African descent who spends his spare time day-trading
the meager savings they possess. Childless despite increasing pressure
from Michel and her eager mother, Leah is resigned to indulge her
affections on her dog; outside of sharing joints with an upstairs neighbor,
that seems like her greatest ambition in an already-burned-out life.

At the beginning of NW, in a section called “Visitation,” Leah is lying in a

hammock penciling a line she has overheard on the radio—“I am the sole
author of the dictionary that defines me.” I should probably write,
“Significantly, at the beginning of NW, Leah etc.,” but it would be
redundant. Part of what makes NW an exasperating read is less its formal
and stylistic “difficulty” than Ms. Smithʼs determination to hammer home
at every turn just how significant each detail is to her story. This is a novel
larded from its first page with portentous signs and dangling leitmotifs
(apple trees with bitter fruits, blurry photographs, an epidemic of gravid
foxes), all served up in restive, jarring sub-Woolfian prose—more on
which later. At any rate, her radio silence is interrupted, sure enough, by a
trickster visitor at the door, a con-artist crackhead named Shar who, it
turns out, is a former schoolmate of Leah and Natalie. Their impromptu
high-school reunion inaugurates the devilish presence of Shar and her
pimpish cohort Nathan Bogie—a druggy street hustler who had been the
apple of Leahʼs eye as a kid—who literally and thematically haunt Leahʼs
slow descent toward breakdown.

Weʼre given a foreboding of Leahʼs decline from the very start. Natalieʼs is
more surprising. She is a second-generation Caribbean who externally is
a marvel of self-made success (“the girl done good from their thousand-
kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from”).
Natalie, who—significantly!—once went by the name Keisha, is the hard-
working, single-minded go-getter whose journey through college and on
to a budding career in the law is all about shedding every stitch of her
penniless Pentecostal upbringing. At school, “Natalie Blake was crazy
busy with self-invention. She lost God so smoothly and painlessly she
had to wonder what sheʼd ever meant by the word. She found politics and
literature, music, cinema.” There is a kind of connect-the-dots trajectory
to Natalieʼs post-collegiate success: conscience still intact, she opts at
first for a paralegal job at “a tiny legal aid firm in Harlesden with half its
stenciled letters peeled off” but abandons it as easily as she did the
name Keisha for the corporate position, the pair of kids, the perfect
husband. But thereʼs a final new identity that Natalie adopts—the Casual
Encounters-trolling “Wild in Wembley”—that marks the limits of her gift
for reinvention and the place where self-creation and self-destruction
dovetail.

This is surprising, not least because itʼs seemingly unfathomable in the

character Ms. Smith spent the previous 150 pages developing. I say
seemingly unfathomable because the style in which Ms. Smith has
chosen to tell Natalieʼs story—one of three main sections in NW, each
dedicated to a particular character—hacks apart her narrative into 150
numbered sections, most of them only a paragraph or two long. These
have subtitles (e.g., “Vivre sa vie”; “Surplus Value, Schizophrenia,
Adolescence”; “Time Slows Down”; “Capitalist Pigs”) that function like
the intertitles in Godardʼs Weekend, though the more apt comparison
might be Two or Three Things I Know About Her. We see bits and pieces
of both Natalie and Leah revealed through all sorts of raking angles—
interior dialogue, fragmentary conversation, quick sketches, little asides
that Ms. Smith cleverly drops into her text—but we ironically enough
never really get a solid sense of just who they are or what motivates their
actions. They never quite know who they are, and neither do we.

Ms. Smithʼs formal experiment in NW demonstrates a certain level of

trust in her readers, making her return to a novelistic terrain she first
explored 13 years ago feel like a new arrival. And it is. The blueprint of
NW is unlike that of any of Ms. Smithʼs other novels: she employs
changes in tense, unorthodox typography, wild swings in perspective,
passages of free-floating dialogue. She samples a gamut of styles:
subchapters written as a set of Google directions, another given in the
form of stage directions. One short interlude is arranged as a Robert
Herrick-ish pattern-poem shaped like an apple tree. Itʼs hard to think of a
novel that sets as many of its scenes on subways and buses, and the
unsettling motion of Ms. Smithʼs shape-shifting text does at least mirror
the whirl of a city whizzing by, but this stylish slew sacrifices those
qualities that were the best aspects of her earlier writing—capacious
urbanity, plump sentences, generosity. NW is a much darker novel than
anything Ms. Smith has written previously, and the tunnel vision of its
characters is clearly part of what she wants us to think about. But you
never can shake the awareness that Ms. Smith is both the conductor of
this peculiar trip and the engineer who rigged the tracks, which is not
quite what you expect from a writer who thought hard about the tricky
business of authorial authenticity in her celebrated New York Review of
Books assault on lyrical realism, “Two Paths for the Novel.” For a novel
that aspires to take its charactersʼ own forays with authenticity so
seriously, the self-conscious artifice of NW is a major roadblock.

Oddly, the most successful passage in NW is the one that is most

tangential to the sagas of Leah and Natalie. It tells in a backward glance
the story of the final day in the life of Felix, who is unknown to the
protagonists and whose murder Leah just happens to catch on a
newscast. A former addict trying to stay clean, he too is a product of a
council upbringing and is striving for direction, having already tried out
the bottom rungs of careers in film and cooking and an ill-fated T-shirt
business. In three marvelously drawn set pieces—with his father, still in
the “dreaded Garvey House” where Felix was raised; with his ex-
girlfriend, who tempts him with coke and cynicism; and with the bloke he
visits to buy a rusted-out MG—Ms. Smith gives us all of what is missing
elsewhere in NW: a real character, birthed from the fabric of her novel,
whom we witness as he drinks ginger beer in a pub, haggles over a car,
has sex, criss-crosses the city, and declares joyously that he is in love. It
all unfolds as if a camera were trailing him. We know how his story will
end, yet even with death hanging over him, Ms. Smith finds a way to zap
him into sweet, cocky, imperfect life. And thereʼs nothing lyrical about it.

editorial@observer.com