Illiterature

NW

Zadie Smith

I'm listening to a guy called Kanda Bongo Man on Spotify right now and he's made me think. How many people from the DRC are likely to read a book review written by a white British guy on the internet? If everyone had access to the internet, a PC/laptop, tablet or phone, would my review of Zadie Smith's NW make it into their daily lives? If not why not?

 

More generally who reads book reviews? What does this charming branch of arts journalism exist for (I am not doing arts journalism FYI)? Are those readers black or white? Are they educated? Europeans, East Asians, Africans? Who is interested in this stuff? Is it relevant and why?

 

I suggest an amazing paradox is at work here. A medium that is both ignorant of human existence yet created for and by humans to interact with, opening up preserves to all sorts of visitors. To me, arts literature is vital. It informs me when I walk through the Ancient City in Rome or watch a Brecht play with friends in Salford. But, returning to my original point, I'm the sort of guy that I imagine ingesting this stuff. What about Kanda Bongo Man?  

 

I'd be fascinated to see the average hour on the internet from a guy working in a souk in Algiers for example. Equally, I'd be curious to see if the 30 year old Sydney businesswoman looks at the pages I think she'll look at when she gets back from her day at work. Guess there's interesting cultural perks for those guys checking your emails at GCHQ after all.

     

Humans, like every other species with a brain, are after all creatures of habit, and there is a natural and easy tendency to go for what we know, as long as that does not cause us emotional or physical pain. I'm still not sure that advances in technology will ultimately broaden many worldviews; instead, they will only give us easier access to the things we love already.

 

And that's why I loved reading NW. I've been a fan of Zadie Smith's style for some time now since reading her first novel White Teeth, and that's mainly down to her, in my eyes, exceptional skill at prying open complex cultural habits and transactions with the delicacy of a pearl fisherman, and documenting what's to be found inside. Information is Smith's stock and trade, and she wields it with a precision that I haven't found in many other writers.

 

It's present in her ear for her fellow Londoners dialects, so ripe that its pungency assails your nostrils, and in her topographical mastery of her city, tugging your sleeve as you navigate a place you (I) have never been to or seen. It's there in her cultural bookmarks; the trick is helping you understand an alien gesture, like buying a tabloid and broadsheet, and then revealing the thought processes deftly, like a street magician plying all of his best tricks before your eyes. 

 

That escape from a culture, a series of habits, is also present in much of Smith's work, and in Natalie/ Keisha Blake she finds the best foil yet to tease out the darkest desires of a historical people. I liked her handling of On Beauty's Howard Belsey - his innate fallibility was revealed with a chastening lack of respect for its subject, and it's easy to feel Smith is closer, although ultimately no less clinical, with her subjects here. 

 

Blake's arc starts in the Eighties in a high-rise in NW London, goes on a brief sojourn to Manchester for her formative years, and returns to the nest for the beginning of her professional career, her marriage and the birth of her children. Throughout a spiritual unrest pervades the post-it note chapters; their brevity and layering of detail upon detail lends a restless, anxious air that Leah's story, Keisha's best friend, does not have. 

 

And as the tower of details becomes ever higher, some inevitably fall off, floating past their antecedents, and a connective loop is established between the actions of a woman apparently rent in two by career, family (her son and daughter, and then her mother, sisters and brothers) and locale. And all of it delivered in a hovering indirect third person that observes its subjects anguishes and desires with a delicacy that saw her compared to Dickens. It's a 'performance' in the theatrical sense, and I think it deserved all the plaudits it received.

 

Suffice to say I was equally taken with Smith's rendition of skinny white girl Leah and the unfortunates Nathan and Felix - although unfortunate in different ways. But this is getting pretty long. The source of my admiration for this book, though, is ever-present in small details; in the bus stop outside Felix's dad's house, in Nathan selling a Tube ticket outside his local station, and in the herky-jerky opening chapters of Leah's encounter with Shar. 

 

There's a sense of being there. Of touching and dealing with things that exist, and an invitation to observe the things described from your own home and background. This book stands up to every perspective, regardless of background or set of interests. It exudes so much confidence that it could only have been written by someone at the peak of their abilities, which is exactly where I believe Zadie Smith can be located right now.

 

Thanks for the book London Fictions