FICTION
Immigrants' progress
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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Zadie Smith's oeuvre draws inspiration from an incredibly layered complexity of life. RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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The Larger Context: Zadie Smith is concerned with the complexities of a global culture.
ONCE again the traditional Booker outrage and upset have come and gone, leaving one to wonder whether an arduous task of reading a long haul of books ends up finally in a selection process that is done by a mere lottery or a literary competition. This year's winner John Banville's The Sea was received with a cold whimper by readers and critics alike. But the books that missed the prize, especially those by Kazauo Ishiguro, Ali Smith and Zadie Smith, remain in the frame of merit as they have undoubtedly offered a sumptuous literary bite.
Though not the best of the Booker shortlist, Zadie Smith's On Beauty is a mature work of fiction which has an international reach as it traverses both sides of the Atlantic and attempts to forge connections across geographical, cultural, political and aesthetic boundaries. It is a contemporary tale of two multicultural families — the Belseys and the Kipps who are brought into collision by contrary passions of resent and prejudice, love and friendship. Smith offers layers of multi-racial problems embedded in the modern cosmopolis from within the contexts of the black-American, black-British and the Haitian exile-experience.
Dominant theme
But these concerns are somewhat dwarfed by the novel's seminal theme which is academic fallibility in modern times. Set within a university campus in New England, the story is reminiscent of Malcolm Bradbury's academic comedies and E.M. Forster's depictions of the English academic society. Smith cleverly disguises the traditional literary links of her novel and purposefully focuses on the immigrants' progress in a post-modern condition. What she successfully manages to register is the importance of the comic in the immigrant Commédie Humaine.
On Beauty is also a comic take on family dynamics, the nature of liberalism, art and other intellectual sass. The novel works well in separate segments but fails as a whole as Smith's Dickensian sort of sweep does not hold in coherence the multitude of notions, characters and situations spread wide across the book. The sinuous narrative, which moves into a density of details and long, stretched-out conversations, is at times downright tiresome. But Smith's verbal energy flows with spirit and she brings off her comedy with an intelligent and an engaging air of neutrality.
Contemporary relevance
Perceptions of what constitutes British contemporary writing has changed dramatically since the 1960s. Much of the writing in Britain today derives from histories linked, particularly, to Britain's colonial past, unfolding a wide imaginative range of stories that speak of cultures, their differences and diversity. V.S.Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon, Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, Kazauo Ishiguro and Caryl Phillips belonged to first generation of writers who initiated a vibrant writing of the immigrants within Britain, expressing cross-cultural concerns in an attempt to forge links with other conflicting cultures. To what extent does the writing of Zadie Smith contribute to this shift in perception of British writing today? And in what way is Smith's work any different from the immigrant literature produced by writers who have explored contextual issues of identity, location, politics and retrieved unspoken histories?
Although Smith's work is placed very much within the contexts of history and cultural dislocation, her oeuvre draws inspiration from an incredibly layered complexity of life. Writing according to her needs to embrace the larger picture of life, coming out of the personal focus and "viewing the web of networks and competing power structures... . its not Keats any more, it is not about truth and beauty — though that is a part of it, but you also need to know about science, technology and all kinds of things". Smith's sensational debut novel White Teeth is a case in point. The novel not only won the critics' accolades but was also a phenomenal mass success. The novel was translated into over 20 languages and was adapted for Channel 4 television in 2002. The reasons for its popularity were mainly due to Smith's sharp humour and her intelligent use of the novel form in unfolding different layers of meanings related to the experiences of ordinary people groping for a certain stability amidst a conflicting environment of culture, class and race.
While some of the inspiration for White Teeth came from Smith's upbringing in North London and her inter-racial parentage (her mother was a Jamaican and her father was English), her second novel The Autograph Man is quite free from any autobiographical traces. Set within a Jewish diaspora community, the story charts the journey of Alex-Li Tandem who moves from out of the hollow veneer of the entertainment world to a self-realised enlightenment. Smith ruminates about the nature of contrived triumph of symbol over experience in this modern day existential quest.
In essence, Smith's fiction is populated with a cast of life-like characters and she seems happy presenting them both as individuals and as social groups, foregrounding notions of the ever-increasing interconnectedness and interdependence of these groups in modern life. Smith is different in the sense that she has the undiminished ability to move out of the personal context and address issues that concern the human predicament in a larger context. In contrast to the contemporary diaspora writing, Smith views colonialism as a part of the bygone past and does not indulge in bashing that past. She positively marches on to examine various other trends and complexities prevailing within the now global culture. This places the work of Zadie Smith in the forefront of change in recent British fiction.
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