Differences of Opinion - Zadie Smith's Latest Reviewed

 Yes, I am a fan of Zadie Smith. That is not the purpose of this post.

This post is about the vagaries of opinions about literature. KH - and a lot of my rejections - make a poitn of how subjective are literary opinions. I keep hoping (and revising) and I want you to keep your hopes alive, too. Subjectivity is the point of this post.

New York magazine published Andrea Long Chu's How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth Since her audacious debut, the author has moved toward realism — and become the least interesting version of herself. I think her position is clear.

It’s a shame. A novelist has a sacred right to hate her first novel, but White Teeth remains by far the best thing Smith has ever written; what bad luck to have done it by 24! Smith has apparently concluded that White Teeth’s greatest strength, its audacious unreality, was in fact its fatal flaw. Today, she is firmly within the realist camp despite her recurring feints at departure. Her much-debated 2008 essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” which pitted the “lyrical realism” of Balzac and Flaubert against the 20th-century avant-garde, reads now like two paths for Zadie Smith. Every time she has set out down the second path, it has looped consolingly back into the first. On Beauty was a novel of ideas; NW, Smith’s fourth novel, dabbled in Joycean modernism. But each new form has represented a fresh attempt to write the morally serious novel that White Teeth had failed to be. This is Smith: radical for the sake of tradition. In another 2008 essay, this one on Middlemarch, Smith argued that a heightened moral sensitivity drove Eliot to “push the novel’s form to its limits.” But for this very reason, the “George Eliot of today” would need to invent her own forms; she certainly wouldn’t be writing a “nineteenth-century English novel.”

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...Like Middlemarch, it is divided into eight volumes, and Eliza even spies Eliot (who privately went by Mrs. Lewes) among the trial’s attendees. “Was this what the admirable Mrs Lewes felt as she worked?” wonders our budding lady novelist as she prepares to write. More than ever, Smith is asking herself the same question. Her two paths for the novel have become a perfect circle: What could be more avant-garde in an age of data harvesting and identity politics than a heartfelt 19th-century novel? The socially minded Eliot believed that through sympathetic portraits of ordinary people, the novel could provide readers with “the raw material of moral sentiment.” With The Fraud, Smith delivers her most passionate defense of this idea to date. Whether it persuades is another matter.

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So sympathize away! No one can stop you. But neither the novel nor its people are so weak that they would collapse if our hearts did not bleed for them. Indeed, it is precisely because we feel that characters in novels are real that we can politically object to the way a writer treats them. This may be what the youngs were saying — not that they feared for their own sensitive souls but that they wished to know how to do real justice to imaginary people. How might Smith have answered them? She dislikes the adage “Write what you know” on the grounds that it is now used to keep novelists within the bright chalk circle of personal identity. So for her sake, let us look somewhere more morally serious. The mid-century literary critic F. R. Leavis once wrote, in his very serious book The Great Tradition, that Austen’s genius was to take “certain problems that life compelled on her as personal ones” and impersonalize them, tracing carefully out of herself and back into the world. What Leavis admired was not that Austen had “stayed in her lane”; it was that she’d had the good sense to ask where it led. This is a splendid notion. It suggests that, for any novelist, there exists a small number of historical problems that, for reasons of luck and temperament, she naturally grasps as the stuff of life. The genius lies in knowing which ones they are.

From The Brisbane Time came Buffoons and the empire: Zadie Smith has fun with an Aussie conman by Beejay Silcox:

The Fraud is a critique, defence and object lesson in artistic thievery all at once. It’s a sly facsimile of a Victorian novel that widens the aperture so we see what those books so assiduously left out. The invisible women “endlessly refilling the port bottles”; the “Carib boys in livery at the threshold of fine houses, got up like Princes of Arabia”; the white-gloved gentlemen who argue for abolition at dinner parties, but live off their granddaddy’s sugar money.

And the writers – the obsequious, vampiric, backstabbing, petty-hearted writers – penning exotic tales of places they never intend to see.

What mighty fun Smith is having, especially with William Ainsworth, a man so reliably tedious that Eliza gags him for practical rather than erotic reasons (it’s the only way she can stop him recounting the plots of his novels). And having been relentlessly – often lazily – compared to Dickens for most of her career, Smith conjures him here and then kills him off. You can almost hear her snickering.

And that, perhaps, is the fatal flaw of The Fraud: it’s a grand in-joke. Much has been made – mostly by Smith herself – of her long-held reluctance to write a historical novel, but also its inevitability. The result is a book that feels so determinedly, diligently historical – so packed full of titbits and unkilled darlings – that it alienates rather than invites.

The Fraud opens in the dusty aftermath of a structural collapse: William’s library has buckled under the weight of his book collection. It is hard to shake that image as Smith’s sixth novel unfolds. But it is also hard to shake the gleeful paradox of it. Novelists are frauds, Smith tells us. Trust me, I’m a novelist.

Kazuo Robinson published  The Ambitious Anachronism of ‘The Fraud’ in The Millions is a more traditional book review, examining characters and plots, but concludes:

Smith has adapted and filled in Bogle’s life without really integrating it or its telling into Eliza’s, but the material is intriguing enough—and Eliza’s interest in it credible enough—that it works. “God preserve me from novel-writing,” thinks Eliza early in her tenure as Ainsworth’s housekeeper, “God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness.” She will feel later that the novel, indulged enough, is just the thing to bring together London court scandal, the arc of a novelist’s career, a Jamaican sugar plantation, and a housekeeper’s many stifled sentiments.

 Three seeing problems, only one seems to find them fatal. Ms. Smith succeeds.

sch 9/16