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How do you follow up a smash hit like White Teeth, which sold, as everyone now knows, for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and multiculturalist at the age of 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking Chinese Jewish autograph hunter, of course, the perils of fame and the shallowness of popular culture come into play.
The Autograph Man goes full throttle with three boys in the back of a car on their way to watch a wrestling match between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks at the Royal Festival Hall. While 12-year-old Alex-Li Tandem gets Big Daddy’s autograph (the beginning of the mania), his father dies of a brain tumor. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel doesn’t live up to the introduction. The heavyweights of the time didn’t hold back with their punches: a “pale, pale successor” (Michiko Kakutani, who enthusiastically reviewed White Teeth, in the New York Times), “cartoonish” and full of “misplaced irony and smiling complicity” (James Wood in the LRB). Others were more generous. whatever. Smith was just getting things out of the way.
Given Smith’s talent for dialogue, it was only a matter of time before she wrote a play. Her first and only stage work is a riotous reworking of The Tale of the Wife of Bath from The Canterbury Tales, transferred to an open mic night at a pub on the Kilburn Highway. Chaucer’s Alison becomes Alveta, a Jamaican-born British woman who married five times in her mid-fifties. Her voice, “bold, honest, cheeky, saucy, outrageous, unapologetic is one I have heard and loved all my life,” Smith wrote in the introduction. “She’s been that bitch since 1983,” the audience is told. It premiered at the Kilburn Kiln Theatre, then transferred to the National in London (you can still watch it on their website) and to New York. Bawdy and brave, here is a woman speaking her truth across the centuries.
Smith’s first foray into historical fiction is based on the Tishburne trial of 1873, when an East End-born butcher living in Australia claimed to be the long-lost heir to a fortune. She finds the story on her doorstep: the conman is buried in an unmarked grave in Willesden, where the novel, like almost all of Smith’s novels, is set. With its menacing populist hero, and its promotion of conspiracy theories and fake news, this Victorian drama has plenty of contemporary resonances. The writing is as smart and assured as ever. Many critics loved it. But, perhaps because it relies on plot (which is not Smith’s strong point) rather than character, the novel for me lacks the flesh-and-blood vitality of her earlier novels. We read Smith to show us how to live now.
“I wanted to express what it’s like to be in the world as a black woman,” Smith said of her fifth, darkest novel. In 1982, two young girls from neighboring areas meet in dance class in Willesden Church Hall. Reinvention, fame, motherhood, and – ahead of its time – cultural appropriation are all touched upon in a novel that deftly moves across time and place. Smith is at her most subtle when it comes to subtle symbols of class and race. From the Barbies and the Argos catalog to the Goths and MTV, she captures her upbringing in the ’80s and ’90s, to the soundtracks of Michael Jackson and Rakim. If the social commentary gets a little heavy-handed at times, the central story of female friendship, with all its jealousy, rivalry and betrayals, never falters.
Childhood loyalties and conflicting desires for freedom and belonging are also at the heart of Smith’s most experimental novel. It’s fair to say that critical opinion was divided: “useless”, “strangely contrived”, with “paper doll characters” Kakutani sniping again; “A joyful, optimistic, angry masterpiece,” “her best,” others lamented. The novel is set in north-west London – clearly the north-west covering Smith’s familiar territory, but with the spirit of Woolf rather than Dickens on her shoulder. The optimism of her early novels has been replaced by “existential melancholy,” as Smith puts it. If you read novels you would know what things are like feel Like what the author calls people’s “tangible ‘thing’,” rather than what happens, you’ll delve into Leah and Natalie’s 30-plus lives confronting the Kilburn summer of 2010. If not, keep moving forward. Fascinating in parts; Infuriating as a whole.
In the UK, we are skeptical of the essay format – perhaps too intellectually flashy – whereas in the US it is a badge of distinction; All great writers at that. Thank goodness, then, for Smith, who has emerged as one of our most vital thinkers and storytellers. The topics in this collection range from Justin Bieber to Brexit, from Jay-Z to Hanif Qureshi, from Joni Mitchell to Schopenhauer, the climate emergency, her childhood pigeons, and joy, all wrapped in immense wit and wit. Here is Smith contemplating on the page the things that are most important to her (books, music, movies, injustice, freedoms of one kind or another). Be warned: reading Smith’s articles will make you realize that you floated through life with the intensity of an amoeba. But you’ll come out better for it. And it’s always great company. A new collection, Dead and Alive, will be released this month.
“White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year-old,” Smith herself, then unknown and now famous, put it in the little literary magazine Butterfly. Everyone was busy comparing her to Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Qureshi and even Dickens. This loud and sunny story of two World War II veterans, best friends Archie Jones from Reading and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim, and their extended families, who arrive in Willesden, turns out to be the novel everyone has been waiting for. Smith arrived with a voice that was at once funny, brave, philosophical and modern, and a perfect fit for hope in the new millennium: publishing’s answer to Cool Britannia. Although the plot is somewhat preposterous, it is clear that the author was incredibly talented. Twenty-five years later, White Teeth remains a landmark in British fiction.
“One might as well start with Jerome’s emails to his father,” begins Smith’s third novel, indicating that what follows is a reworking of E.M. Forster’s classic Howard’s End. What impudence! Two families, the liberal Belseys and the establishment Kippses (Forster’s Schlegels and Wilcoxes), from New England and the Kilburns respectively, became fatefully intertwined. Art, faith, rap, race, pain, and death all wrapped up in a comic college novel and a gritty literary tribute. On Beauty is Smith’s only novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize (how He is which?); She won the Orange Prize, which is now the Women’s Prize. Martin Amis said he read everything by Smith “with a permanent smile of admiration”; This book makes your face hurt. Much has been made of early maturation of white teeth. Smith was only 30 years old (the same age as Forster) when she directed this wide-ranging, poignant novel. The author turns 50 this month. Watch this space.
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