Book Review: Schulz on Zadie Smith's NW

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  By Kathryn Schulz - Vulture

Twelve years ago, in what remains one of the most remarkable literary debuts of our time, Zadie Smith strode into the new millennium and stole the show. Her first book, White Teeth, was funny, smart, and stunningly self-assured, and it announced the arrival not just of a novel but of a novelist: someone who could really do this fiction thing, who took its possibilities both seriously and gleefully.

Not that everyone was sold. The literary critic James Wood famously accused Smith and her stylistic peers (DeLillo, Pynchon, Rushdie) of “hysterical realism.” Rather than challenging realism, as modernism had done, they took it over like kids in a condemned building, overcrowding it, stringing the party lights of plot across the roof, hanging a story or six out of every window. What they sacrificed along the way, Wood argued, was psychological development and moral seriousness.

Me, I loved Smith’s narrative exuberance, and I don’t think any literary desiderata were harmed in the making of her tales. However antic her storytelling got, the story itself—about how we negotiate the legacy of colonialism, and the small mutual colonization that is marriage—did not strike me as lacking in emotional or ethical heft.

Interestingly, though, after her 2005 book, On Beauty—another brilliant update to the traditional novel—Smith herself started looking askance at the form. In her own most famous piece of literary criticism, she proposed “Two Paths for the Novel”: the long, worn road of realism, or the fresh earth flung up by the deconstruction workers who came along and bulldozed it—exposing its foundations in white liberal thought, demolishing its bedrock assumptions about meaning, language, and selfhood.

Smith championed the second path, and her new book seems to be an attempt to travel it. NW is about the divergent adulthoods forged by four people who grew up in Caldwell, a council estate (or housing project) in the eponymous northwest quadrant of London. It is also about a terrible crime, the nature of trust, the reach of the past, and whether any of us controls our own life story.

This is promising literary terrain, thematically sprawling and emotionally dense, well suited to Smith’s eagle eye and formidable wingspan.
Read full review at Vulture