Zadie Smith's Indecision

Facility is the most dubious of gifts. On Beauty is Zadie Smith's third novel in the past five years (she's still only 30), and it boosts her total page count above 1,200. Hers is clearly a mind that teems with characters, plots, situations, ideas. What she seems to lack, however, is a sense of restraint--or, more to the point, a sense of form. In the acknowledgments, she thanks her editors, "without whom this book would be longer and worse." The phrase suggests horrors. Given how long and rambling and thematically incoherent the novel is in its final form, one can only imagine what the manuscript must have looked like.

The problem may be fame as much as facility. It can't be easy to rein in a writer as successful as Smith, and with the level of acclaim she's achieved, it can't be easy to curb oneself, either. Her debut novel, White Teeth, was received with a frenzy of adulation: Showered with awards and translated into more than twenty languages, it vaulted its author into the forefront of young British novelists. Smith's personal story didn't hurt: The 24-year-old daughter of an English father and Jamaican mother, she'd signed the book deal while still at Cambridge. Her looks didn't hurt, either: Smith takes a great publicity shot. In fact, her ascent was part of the late-'90s fad for beautiful young women novelists with Commonwealth roots (itself a subset of the post-cold war globalization frenzy). Smith made a third with Arundhati Roy, whose God of Small Things won the Booker Prize in 1997, and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies, published in 1999, won the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

Did these works live up to their billing? Roy's certainly did. The God of Small Things is an undoubted masterpiece, the finest debut novel in the language since Thomas Pynchon's V. in 1963. Unfortunately, at least for literature, Roy has turned to political activism and may never write a novel again. Interpreter of Maladies is a more difficult case. Its nine stories exhibit a high degree of competence, but it's the kind of competence that makes you want to call for the abolition of writing programs (not to mention the Pulitzer Prize for fiction). The pieces in Interpreter of Maladies are crafted--no, machine-tooled--to within a millimeter of their tiny, calculating lives; their writing-handbook devices--the inciting event, the governing symbol, the wry turn, the final epiphany--arrive one after another, exactly on time, with the subtlety of a pit bull and the spontaneity of a digital clock. Lahiri has since published The Namesake, a dull, studied, pallid novel that says remarkably little about the immigrant experience while elaborately fetishizing the consumption patterns of the liberal upper-middle class.

And White Teeth? The novel is certainly impressive, especially for a young, first-time author, but not for the obvious reasons. The hypercaffeinated tone, which is supposed to come across as exuberant and sassy, is slick and glib and ultimately exhausting, a salesman's relentless enthusiasm. The sprawling multifamily plot, while admirable for its ambition, is also a gigantic mess, to which the novel's many divisions and subdivisions (each with its catchy little title) give only the illusion of coherence. The postcolonial thematics--history, memory, identity, hybridity--which could have seemed fresh only to someone who'd been living in a cave for twenty years, are served up with the baldness of an undergraduate essay. And all of this, along with the novel's postmodern coin tricks, is so obviously a Rushdie rip-off it's excruciating. But White Teeth exhibits two great strengths, neither of them the kind one expects from so young a writer: the acuteness of its social satire and the brilliance with which it inhabits perspectives utterly different from its author's. Smith gives us aging Indian waiters, bookish teenagers, high-handed liberal moms and a dozen or two others, all with a wicked ear for dialogue and a gimlet eye for the dodges and poses of the social comedy. This was not your typical first novel. White Teeth wasn't a great work, as so many claimed, but it was a work of great promise.

In the unjustly maligned Autograph Man, her sophomore effort, Smith began to fulfill that promise. By narrowing her scope, she not only created a more thematically coherent and architecturally streamlined work but also got closer to her material. Her characters are more deeply felt, more intimately known, than in White Teeth, and so seem more autonomous and unpredictable, less an emanation of their creator's ideas--and this without Smith's having forsworn her satiric edge or the comic sparks she's so deft at striking off it. The earlier novel's arm-waving self-consciousness has moderated into a bracing wit and snap that's akin to Martin Amis's, but not so much as to seem derivative. And Smith's uncanny ability to intuit her way into minds radically different from her own is even more startlingly on display. The novel's protagonist is a young Jewish man, and Smith writes from inside his perspective so convincingly--including, ironically, his familiar Jewish obsession with dividing everything in the world into "Jewish" and "goyish"--that she seems to have been inhabiting it her entire life. Whatever value Smith may be thought to have as a poster girl for multiculturalism, her work is a stunning refutation of all attempts to partition culture or consciousness along any such lines: male and female; gay and straight; black, brown, yellow and white (or Christian and Muslim, for that matter, the Allies and Axis of the cultural right). The empire of the spirit brooks no Balkanization.

• PAGE
• 1
• 2
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.