Zadie Smith, The Fraud (2023)

Is it her best yet? Best ever? It's very good!

Ah, the internet? Remember that thing?

Not this thing, this corporate-owned social media saturated click bait bs hellscape. That thing, the big unknown. That thing that would give information what it wanted, to be free, and knowledge would proliferate, you could access The New York Times from anywhere, any time, the barriers would fall, and wisdom and inclusiveness would flourish. Remember that? A rising of all boats.

Right?

It's still out there, in fragments, my desk is scattered with the results. (Though, funnily enough, what's not on my desk is a copy of Zadie Smith's 2023 novel, The Fraud, because I read it as an audio book, performed by Smith herself.)

Here’s a link to Adam Kirsch's review “Come as You Are” (Harper's, September 2023 issue) .

Here’s Harper’s spin off podcast discussion (September 5, 2023).

Here's a link to Bradon Taylor's newsletter (August 17, 2023), where calls The Fraud Smith's "brilliant book" and praises "Zadie's mind!!!!"

Michael Gorra on how Smith's novel "asks if we might all be frauds of some sort, wearing masks and performing as people who are not quite ourselves" (New York Review of Books, September 21, 2023).

The title of The Atlantic's Jordan Kisner review essay (October 2023) is "Fiction On Trial." "Zadie Smith's ambitious new novel asks: Do we expect the genre to do too much?"

In The Times Literary Supplement (September 15, 2023), Claire Lowdon isn't impressed. "This time Zadie Smith isn't even making her wobbly way round the side of the ice rink. This time she has barely mustered the courage to leave the bleachers ... at some point you've just got to be brave enough to push off."

Smith herself took to The New Yorker (July 10 & 17, 2023) to write "Killing Dickens: Why I wrote a historical novel."

The New York Times review by Karen Mahajan (August 28, 2023): "As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive."

NYT also reviewed the audio book (October 13, 2023): "With the virtuosic agility of an actor in a one-woman play, Smith as narrator so fully embodies each of her many distinct characters that she exposes, sometimes without their even knowing, the ways in which every one of us misrepresents ourselves in one way or another."

NYT book podcast interviewed Smith (September 22, 2023), then discussed her again as part of "Audio Books Bonanza" (September 29, 2023).

Washington Post (August 30, 2023): "The best and most poignant sections of The Fraud examine the highly prescribed space for a sharp, smart woman in a culture that has no interest in sharp, smart women, particularly a dependent one of a certain age with little money."

I'd be curious is anyone found a Canadian newspaper who reviewed Smith's brilliant book (I didn't).

What gives Canada? Well, we know, don't we? In Canada, writers are interesting, their books, less so. Not saying folks weren't passionate about the book, just that the column inches didn't prioritize analysis. In publicity vs criticism, p>c.

Critical commentary is dead, dead, dead.

The Globe and Mail ran a profile of Smith, CBC Radio interviewed Smith, ditto The Georgia Straight.

But seriously. What are people saying about this book? What are people thinking?

Enter the internet, circa 1990s, what's left of it, the humble hyperlink, the engorged search engine.

I had previously read one Zadie Smith novel, White Teeth (2000), one Zadie Smith pandemic memoir, Intimations (2020), and one Zadie Smith essay collection, Changing My Mind (2009), which I wrote about on my blog, The Underground Book Club back in the day.

In a terrific compare and contrast essay ("Two Directions for the Novel"), Smith shows what literary criticism can be and so often isn't, an opportunity to be open to different perspectives and not build up an argument on one side with the goal of eliminating any opposition.

The two novels contrasted in this essay are Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Tom McCarthy's Remainder. Do these novels represent the two directions for the novel? The two directions or just two directions? They are two very different novels. They may even be, as Smith suggests, "antipodal." "One," she writes, "is the strong refusal of the other." But are they the only two paths novels can go by? Unlikely.

Smith writes:

All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us down this road the true future of the Novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It is perfectly done — in a sense, that's the problem. It's so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait (73).

In her more recent piece in The New Yorker, Smith reminds us that novels are meant to be, well, novel.

If you pick up a novel and find that it could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, well, then, that novel is not quite doing its self-described job, is it? Surely, it's in the very DNA of the novel to be new?

Still, the absoluteness of this conclusion "has come under some pressure," she writes. "Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it." Was she prepared to let go "a prejudice against the form [of the historical novel], dating back to student days"? She was. Has she maintained her belief that the novel must "bring news"? She has.

Bully for her, and what a pleasure for us.

The Fraud is a novel about many things. One of those things, is other novels. Yes, it's cool, I guess, that Dickens is in it, as a character, as an influence, as a counter-influence, as a corpse laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. Smith's New Yorker piece is framed around the shadow anxiety of influence Dickens casts over British literature, those who run towards him, those who run away. Smith was firmly in the latter camp, and she tried to remain so, even as she was writing her own 19th-century embedded novel. As she says in The New Yorker, though, Dickens wouldn't let her be. He even showed up as a character, but she killed him off as swiftly as she could.

Some of the above linked bits mention Virginia Woolf, especially as her example influenced Smith's novel NW (2013). Smith referenced this in The Guardian (August 1, 2013):

When I was writing this novel what I really wanted to do was create people in language. To do that you must try to do justice simultaneously to the unruly, subjective qualities of language, and to what I want to call the concrete "thingyness" of people. Which was Virginia Woolf's way of being a modernist – she loved language and people simultaneously – and her model is important to me. I admire Beckett and respect Joyce. I love Woolf. Whenever the going gets tough I reread her journals and it helps me through.

I find Woolf in The Fraud as well, especially in how Smith has fun with London's men of letters and their literary soirees, such depictions which borrow surely from Woolf's Orlando (1928) and that book's familiar fun-making.

Jordan Kisner's "Fiction on Trial" piece in The Atlantic (October 2023) raises the stakes, arguing Smith questions the viability of "the contested genre itself." He find the seeds of the questions in Smith's October 24, 2019, essay in The New York Review of Books, "Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction." Kisner quotes Smith: "Do we know what fiction was?" And he notes The New York Times critic Dwight Garner sought other worldly help (?) in a May 1, 2023 review, which began: "Siri, what was the novel?"

Siri's made-up answer (Garner confesses he wrote it):

Since you asked, it was the subtlest form of expression known to humans. The first novel was probably Murasaki Shikibu’s ‘Tale of Genji,’ written in the 11th century. The last one that mattered, closing a millennium’s loop, was probably Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth,’ published in 2000. What’s come since has been the death rattle, and remixes of that death rattle.

Ah, but what about the plot, you ask?

Enough of this thematic contextual background bs?

Well, it's hot enough for a Netflix miniseries, surely. Lots of conspiracy and paranoia, good guys and bad guys, secret histories exposed, violence against innocents, potential paths for redemption, possibly even justice, or not.

My prediction is The Fraud will be book Smith is later known for. Why? Because it is highly teachable. Lots of avenues for student essays. History of the novel? Check. Impacts of slavery? Check. Social and economic limitations for women because of gender-defined roles? Check. Class conflict? Yep. Incrementalism vs revolutionary spirit? Uh-huh.

The through line here is one Eliza Touchet, a real person. In 2009, a copy of Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843), signed by the author to Mrs. Touchet on December 17, 1843, sold for the highest price at auction of any Dickens title ever. Touchet was the cousin-by-marriage of the writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, now nearly forgotten, who entertained literary men, Dickens among them. Touchet had the role of housekeeper, following the death of her husband. In the novel, she is also lover to Ainsworth and his (first) wife, Fanny.

Smith spends many pages setting the scene for the action to follow, what I'm going to call the two sub-plots, the main plotline being Touchet's passage through the world. She is smart, observant, bound by her sense of moral certainties, though as a practical matter that doesn't include infidelity. What it does include, notably, is anti-slavery agitation. She is an abolitionist, and she is glad when Britain ends the slave trade in 1834, and she is anxious enough about slavery's money trail that her queries about the act of ownership of human beings persist.

The two sub-plots bring these queries into sharp relief. First, "the trial of the century" (another real event) wildly captures the British public's curiosity and attention.

From Wikipedia:

Roger Tichborne, heir to the family's title and fortunes, was presumed to have died in a shipwreck in 1854 at age 25. His mother clung to a belief that he might have survived, and after hearing rumours that he had made his way to Australia, she advertised extensively in Australian newspapers, offering a reward for information. In 1866, a Wagga Wagga butcher known as Thomas Castro came forward claiming to be Roger Tichborne. Although his manners and bearing were unrefined, he gathered support and travelled to England. He was instantly accepted by Lady Tichborne as her son, although other family members were dismissive and sought to expose him as an impostor.

During protracted enquiries before the case went to court in 1871, details emerged suggesting that the Claimant might be Arthur Orton, a butcher's son from Wapping in London, who had gone to sea as a boy and had last been heard of in Australia. After a civil court had rejected the Claimant's case, he was charged with perjury; while awaiting trial he campaigned throughout the country to gain popular support. In 1874, a criminal court jury decided that he was not Roger Tichborne and declared him to be Arthur Orton.

Wild, right? Wilder than, say, the 45th President of the United States of America? Not so much.

What does the Tichborne case have to do with Mrs. Touchet? First, it's what's going on, and Touchet is alert to what's going on. Everyone wants to know, What do you think? Is he or isn't he? She thinks he isn't, but the second Mrs. Ainworth, whom Touchet isn't sleeping with and can't stand, thinks he is. The second Mrs. Ainsworth, Sarah, was a former Ainsworth servant girl, and she's a working class voice of the people if there ever was one. Tichborne's mother recognized the Claimant, and that's all Sarah needs to know: "A mother knows, she does!" Also, how else to screw the rich except to promote one of the poor?

Drain the swamp, right?

Sarah just must go to the trial, and Touchet can't stay away. What is going on? Has the world gone nuts? Well, misinformation and misdirection is as much the name of the game in 1871 as in 2016. There's no social media, but there are plenty of tabloids.

Truth? Did you say truth? Come on now.

Touchet goes to the trial and can't keep her eyes off sub-plot number two: Andrew Bogle, also a real person. From the Joy Lunsden blog: "[O]ne of the chief witnesses supporting the Claimant, was a Black man called Andrew Bogle, who had apparently been a slave on the Hope Estate in St. Andrew, Jamaica."

Bogle's story, as told on this blog, is essentially sub-plot #2 of The Fraud. It's another wild one, and I won't summarize it all here, except to say Bogel is brought from Jamaica to England to act as a servant, where he meets and knows Roger Tichborne as a child. Later, he goes to Australia, where the Claimant announces himself, and Bogle believes he is indeed the lost Tichborne.

Both return to England, where the Claimant makes his claim, and Bogle testifies on his behalf in court. Even after the Claimant loses two court cases, Bogle maintains his position. On this question, one isn't sure what to make of him. Of his very existence and the story of his life, Mrs. Touchet is curious in the extreme, and she manages to take him out for lunch to hear him tell it. To my mind, this is the heart of the novel. This is a story Dickens could never tell. Can we imagine him writing so clearly about the racialized Other? On the other hand, Smith references Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), where slavery clearly features. Debate continues about what was up to here.

Smith demands attentive readers, who must juggle different settings and rhetorical pitches. There is much here that is absurd and comic, but there is also much that is earnest and horrible. Having begun by taking readers on a deep dive into the Ainsworth household, and then introducing them to the Trial of the Century, Smith has Bogle then tell them in penetrating detail about the heart sharp violence of the enslavement of (Black) human beings. Touchet wants to see everything, or at least as much as she can, given the limitations of her position, and Bogle tells her plainly.

Karen Mahajan, in her New York Times review (August 28, 2023) sums up this section nicely: Bogle, she writes,

...tells Eliza his harrowing tale of being raised on a brutal Jamaican plantation and making his way to England as a valet. “My life has had many parts,” he says, sounding like a Naipaul narrator. It is in this section that the odd structure of the novel, cutting between time periods and characters in very short chapters, has its biggest payoff, with decades racing by in bite-size passages that yield first-rate observations about colonialism like this: “England was not a real place at all. England was an elaborate alibi.”

One reason Touchet wants to know is because she has inherited her late husband's money, much of it generated from the slave trade, and she doesn't want anything to do with it, but she must decide what to do with it. She craves, she says, a "theory of truth." (Come on!) Meanwhile, her lawyer is expecting to be instructed, and Touchet delays and delays until she delays no more. I won't say what she decides. Something must be left to be discovered.

We're moving towards the conclusion now, but we can't end without engaging with Adam Kirsch's fascinating review essay, "Come as You Are" (Harper's, September 2023), which takes The Fraud as its starting point and develops a theory of Gen X novelists. The subtitle is "On Zadie Smith and the Gen X Novel." Being solidly Gen X, though not a novelist, I was intrigued.

Famously, Gen X, those born between 1965-1980, is the tiny generation squeezed between Baby Boomers and Millennials. Kirsch proposes to split this tiny generation in two: early- and late-Gen X.

In pop culture, the Gen X canon had been firmly established by the mid-Nineties: Nirvana’s Nevermind appeared in 1991, the movie Reality Bites in 1994, Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill in 1995. Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X, which popularized the term, was published in 1991. And the novel that defined the literary generation, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996, when David Foster Wallace was about to turn thirty-four—technically making him a baby boomer.

[Elif] Batuman was a college sophomore in 1996, presumably experiencing many of the things that happen to [her character] Selin in [her novel] Either/Or. But by the time she began to fictionalize those events twenty years later, she joined a group of writers who defined themselves, ethically and aesthetically, in opposition to the older representatives of Generation X. For all their literary and biographical differences, writers like Nicole Krauss, Teju Cole, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin share some basic assumptions and aversions—including a deep skepticism toward anyone who claims to speak for a generation, or for any entity larger than the self.

Though Smith first published in 2000, by virtue of her birth in 1975 Kirsch places her in the later Gen X cohort: Kirsch finds the deep skepticism noted in the last sentence of the quotation above in the most direct place possible, "in the title of Zadie Smith's new novel." Though he also makes the case the Smith spans the two cohorts. Both Wallace and Smith, for example (prior to 9/11), saw "ideological extremism as a relic fit for spoofing":

Wallace’s Infinite Jest features an organization of Quebecois separatists called Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents—that is, the Wheelchair Assassins. In Smith’s White Teeth, one of the main characters joins a militant group named KEVIN, for Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation.

Kirsch claims for the early-Gen X writers: "the most important battles were not being fought abroad but at home, and within themselves. Their enemies were the forces of cynicism and indifference that Wallace depicted in Infinite Jest, set in a near-future America stupefied by consumerism, mass entertainment, and addictive substances."

For the second cohort of Gen X writers, Krisch finds: "Writers of this cohort do sometimes try to imagine a better world, but they tend to do so in terms that are metaphysical rather than political, moving at one bound from the fallen present to some kind of messianic future."

I don't know about you, but to me messianic anything seems just dumb, dumb, dumb. Thus, I like how Smith splits the difference.

Kirsh on The Fraud:

Though much of the novel deals with the case and the history of slavery in Britain’s Caribbean colonies, it is first and foremost the story of Eliza Touchet, and how her exposure to the trial alters her sense of the world and of herself. “The purpose of life was to keep one’s mind open,” she reflects, and it is this ability to see things from another perspective that makes her a novelist manqué.

This is exactly what I admired about Smith's essay collection, which right in its title (Changing My Mind) celebrates flexibility of thought, an Isaiah Berlin-type liberalism. Of course, it is exactly this perspective that has seen its territorial grounding shrink in the past decade from pressures of ideologues, technologies, and charlatans of all kinds.

Kirsch on The Fraud:

Eliza is a right-minded progressive who was active in the abolitionist movement in the 1830s. Proud of her judgment, she sees many problems with the Claimant’s story and finds it incredible that anyone could believe him. To her dismay, however, she lives with someone who does. William’s new wife, Sarah, formerly his servant, sees the Claimant as a victim of the same establishment that lorded over her own working-class family. The more she is informed of the problems with the Claimant’s argument, the more obdurate she becomes: “HE AIN’T CALLED ARTHUR ORTON IS HE,” she yells, “THEM WHO SAY HE’S ORTON ARE LYING.”

What Smith is dramatizing, of course, is the experience of so many liberal intellectuals over the past decade who had believed themselves to be on the side of “the people” only to find that, whether the issue was Brexit or Trump or COVID-19 protocols, the people were unwilling to heed their guidance, and in fact loathed them for it. It is in order to get to the bottom of this phenomenon that Eliza keeps attending the Tichborne trial, in much the same spirit that many liberal journalists reported from Trump rallies.

Within Kirsch's Gen X framework, I am in the early cohort, consistent with my birth year. I have not been a reader of E.M. Forster. (Howard's End (1910), that was a movie, right? Didn't see it.) Still, I'm now curious about the Smith-Forster connection highlighted by Kirsch:

Her 2005 novel, On Beauty, was a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s Howards End, and while her style has continued to evolve from book to book, Forster’s influence has been clear ever since, in everything from her preference for short chapters to her belief in “keep[ing] one’s mind open.”

Smith’s affinity for Forster owes something to their analogous historical situations. An Edwardian liberal who lived into the age of fascism and communism, Forster defended his values—“tolerance, good temper and sympathy,” as he put it in the 1939 essay “What I Believe”—with something of a guilty conscience, recognizing that the militant younger generation regarded them as “bourgeois luxuries.”

Smith ends The Fraud with this conflict: to hold to a higher belief in incrementalism or to push for radical change now. You say you want a revolution, well, you know. Or as Kirsch puts it: "To the next generation, the millennials, their [Gen X writers'] disengagement from the collective struggle may seem reprehensible."

Smith has Bogle's son tell Mrs. Touchet: "By God, don't you see that what young men hunger for is not 'improvement' or 'charity' or any of the watchwords of your Ladies' Societies. They hunger for truth! For truth itself! For justice!"

Well, alright, then. Don't you know you can count me out/in.