Zadie Smith, the literary icon at her best when she’s out of fashion

Since her big-money debut advance at a precocious 24 years of age, Zadie Smith has been expected to speak for her generation. But the elegant writer, who has carved out a space as an intriguingly ambivalent public intellectual and releases her first historical novel, ‘The Fraud’ this week, is most compelling when she ignores the zeitgeist, writes Claire Allfree

Smith is one of our most supple and elegant novelists (AP)

I realise my somewhat ambivalent view of human selves is wholly out of fashion,” wrote Zadie Smith in the introduction to her 2018 essay collection, Feel Free. By which she meant that the notion of the individual as containing multitudes – not to mention contradictions – jarred sharply with today’s obsessive identity wars, in which tribal affiliation is king. Or, as she put it, a current moment, in which “millions of more or less amorphous selves will now find themselves solidifying into protestors, activists, marchers... experts, critics”.

Her point was that such a moment is almost entirely inimical to the art of writing fiction, which depends for its lifeblood upon the idea of the self as mutable and contingent. “I am Philip, I am Colson... I am Virginia... I am Chimamanda – but how easily I might have been somebody else, with their feelings and preoccupations, with their obsessions and flaws and virtues,” she wrote. “This to me is the primary novelistic impulse: this leap into the possibility of another life.”

Smith has been a man of Chinese-Jewish heritage, a drug addict, a Bangladeshi war vet, an adulterous husband, and inhabited countless further possible lives throughout a near-25-year writing career. In her most recent novel, The Fraud, published next Thursday, she takes another, different sort of leap: into the past.

The book is her first foray into historical fiction, and features a cast of real people, including the amusingly terrible Victorian novelist William Ainsworth, who wrote more than two dozen awful novels; his housekeeper and sometime lover, Eliza Touchet; the cockney butcher Arthur Orton, who became an unlikely working-class hero during an 1873 trial after attempting to pass himself off as Sir Roger Tichbourne, the missing heir to a vast fortune; and Andrew Bogle, a star witness in the trial who was once enslaved on a Jamaican plantation. Yet each character exists untethered from their real-life self, living instead as a fabulously realised product of Smith’s singular, restless imagination. “Am I the right person to write a book about a load of white people in Victorian England?” she asked rhetorically in a recent interview with Vogue on the modish subject of authors writing characters whose life experience they don’t share. “What qualifies me exactly? Literally nothing.”

Nothing and therefore everything. Smith is one of our most supple and elegant novelists, who over the past two decades has gracefully aged from the 24-year-old audacious debut author of 2000’s White Teeth, which upon its publication established the model for the modern post-colonial London novel, to her current and surely permanent incarnation as literary icon and public intellectual. She has since published five further novels, including 2012’s NW – which, like White Teeth, was set in her beloved Willesden, where she was born and where she now lives.

But Smith is also a prolific essayist, with three collections to her name. She writes outside her chosen profession as novelist all the time, frequently contributing introductions to reissued novels and pieces to newspapers. One such piece was an interview with Jay-Z for The New York Times in 2012; the two immersed themselves so deeply in the subject of hip-hop, about which Smith is both passionate and authoritative, that she didn’t ask him a single question about Beyoncé, much to the disbelief of her editor. Her introduction to the recent reissue of Toni Morrison’s short story “Recitatif” is a masterclass in how to read.

Yet it is White Teeth – which explored Britain’s relationship with its own history through the friendships between a diverse group of Londoners – that remains the book with which she is most associated. That is the curse of the outrageously successful debut novelist, of course: the book, named by Time magazine in 2010 as one of the best novels of the previous 100 years, won her a reputed £250,000 advance, five prominent literary awards, and a slew of headlines proclaiming her the voice of globalised, borderless, multi-ethnic London. She wrote it after a couple of short stories she’d published attracted attention while she was still studying English literature at Cambridge University, and such was the advance hype that the first print run comprised a staggering 42,000 copies. The pressure, she has since said, was a “responsibility”: she spent subsequent years trying to “earn” the advance, in terms of status.

Her later novels travelled to America (2005’s On Beauty) and West Africa (2016’s Swing Time) and each one plays around with style and form: On Beauty relocates EM Forster’s novel Howards End to an east coast university town; NW – about four people living in the same postcode – splices together multiple narrative techniques; Swing Time was written in the first person, the first time Smith felt able to do that, although she has been quick to point out the novel is a “false autobiography”. No angsty diaristic confessionals for her: leave that for those who have the narrowest possible understanding of fiction. All the same, none of these novels has had the same impact as White Teeth, although NW is easily its equal. The fault is not so much Smith’s as it is perhaps our dangerous cultural instinct to cast an author who has once proved herself a spokesperson for the zeitgeist as always a spokesperson for the zeitgeist. Our desire for Smith to write only seminal novels that speak directly to a generation has perhaps perversely occluded her capacious talents.

Smith was born in 1975 to a white father and a Jamaican mother, who was younger than her husband by almost 30 years. She grew up on the Athelstan Gardens housing estate with two younger brothers, and changed her name from Sadie to Zadie at the age of 14, in honour of her beloved Zora Neale Hurston. She supported herself through university with stints as a cabaret singer – she still occasionally sings live – and it was at Cambridge that she met her now husband, the Irish poet Nick Laird, whom she married in 2004. For years they lived in the house in Willesden that Smith had bought with her advance, at a time when, as she has wryly noted, that sort of money enabled one to buy a house in London.

Yet however rigorously Smith upheld the principle of novelistic freedom in her work, the culture in which she operated kept trying to limit it. However much her novels resisted the burden of representation, whatever their interest in ideas of race, identity, class and colonial history, she felt that people insisted on seeing her as a representation: of multiculturalism, of feminine success, of a social mobility that had enabled her to move from a Willesden council estate to being the toast of literary London. In 2010, she and Laird moved to New York, where she taught creative writing at NYU and where they had two children, Kit and Harvey. “I was definitely weary of London’s claustrophobic literary world, or at least the role I had been assigned within it: multicultural (ageing) wunderkind,” she wrote earlier this year. “Off I went.” By all accounts the couple had a high old time, writing and teaching during the day and hosting parties at night: the guest list would regularly include Rachel Weisz, Martin Amis, Lena Dunham. “When it comes to 7pm, I like to have a martini,” Smith said recently, and if that’s not a sentence to endear you to a person, I can’t think what is.

There is something startlingly democratic about Smith the thinker

Smith, who returned with her family to London during the pandemic, famously refuses in interviews to supply the sort of political bon mot that would make an easy headline. “I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation,” she has said. She has a famous distaste for social media (she never tweets) and despises smartphones. Modern communication, with its preference for the binary, the oppositional, the soundbite, is at odds with the multitudinous longform possibilities of both the novel and the essay, the latter at which she excels.

It is ironic, then, that Smith should be so quotable. There is something startlingly democratic about Smith the thinker: her non-fiction pieces rove hungrily across subjects from hip-hop to philosophy, from race to culture, with such inclusive felicity that you could argue she has single-handedly rehabilitated a form once considered the preserve of lofty academics. She has a way of talking directly to the reader in her essays, of generating such an easy conversational intimacy that the reader can almost flatter themselves into thinking they share Smith’s exceptional clear-sighted intelligence. In a world seething with foamy-mouthed warriors of the righteous, Smith comes across as so damn reasonable, even while critiquing the modern instinct to retreat into entrenched ideological positions.

“I was an equal-opportunity voyeur,” she wrote in an essay, “In Defence of Fiction”, in 2019. “I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody. Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.”

The Fraud, quite aside from its deep engagement with the legacy of slavery, a legacy in which it suggests even the Victorian novel itself is implicated, speaks directly to this idea. In the populist anti-elitist cause her character Orton comes to exemplify, one can see a very modern critique of the dangers of groupthink, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The novel has had largely but not uniformly positive reviews, although much of the criticism has been concerned with its unwieldy structure. For Smith, it is the novel form that allows us to free ourselves of rigid definitions of selfhood and see ourselves and each other the most clearly. May she always remain out of fashion.

‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith, published by Hamish Hamilton, is out on 7 September