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The predicament of being Zadie Smith
NILANJANA S. ROY
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Looking at the contours of her development, On Beauty marks the beginning of her real journey as a writer.
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PHOTO: AP
Coming into her own: Zadie Smith with the Orange Prize.
ZADIE SMITH sings jazz and used to tap dance. Zadie Smith went to King's College, Cambridge. Zadie Smith's real name was Sadie Smith, but she changed it long before she became famous with White Teeth, earning a record £2,50,000 advance for the first novel she wrote at the age of 21.
Zadie Smith doesn't like references to her beauty, even though Google Images carries over 3,600 pictures of the author at various stages. Zadie Smith's marriage to fellow writer Nick Laird is as perfect as her acknowledgement to him in her third, Orange Prize-winning novel, On Beauty: "I thank my husband, whose poetry I steal to make my prose look pretty. ... This book is dedicated to him, as is my life."
Overload of trivia
Like many readers, I'm an unwilling player of Trivial Pursuit, the Zadie Smith Edition. We know too much about her, and none of what we know is of much consequence. We know that her name is a cliché: one year, it's Monica Ali who's the "new Zadie Smith", the next it's Ali Smith who's the "new Zadie Smith", and meanwhile the old Zadie Smith is still very much with us.
Few authors have had a baptism like hers, or lived out early adulthood under such an insistent media glare. White Teeth, published in 2000, was the work of a young, bright mind discovering history for the sake of her generation. A generous blurb by Salman Rushdie, the gust of publicity over the large advance and the rush of interest in the "multicultural" novel sent it to the top of the charts. Zadie Smith grew up like celebrity child film stars, a paparazzi-haunted writer whose prose was dissected on the books pages just as her changing taste in clothes was analysed on the fashion pages.
It was easy to forget that she was young, and White Teeth, inevitably, disappointed. A survey by The Bookseller encapsulated the contradictory reaction to White Teeth: it was one of the books most often picked up by reading groups, and it was one of the books that reading groups most often expressed disappointment with.
Meanwhile, Smith was on the successful writer's rollercoaster, doing the autograph softshoe shuffle, the book tour quickstep, the litfest rap, the interview samba, and if she missed a beat, everyone noticed. If she seemed tired or snappy, people complained about her aloofness, her refusal to play the part.
Zadie Smith may have been a media creation, but her talent was unmistakeable — and she rapidly outgrew the book that had made her famous. Asked how she felt about White Teeth, "I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault." She meant it. Later, on yet another book tour — they were blurring in Smith's mind now — she wrote: "Any original thought the writer ever had — every pretty black mark she ever made on a piece of white paper — is replaced by the endlessly reoccurring phenomena of the writer's own name rising up at them in embossed font on the front of a book they have come to despise."
Not an easy read
The response to her second novel, The Autograph Man, was critical. It was about Alex, who becomes a collector of autographs in the wake of his father's death, and few things convey the dour, schematic flavour of this novel more than the helpful questions Random House offers on its website for the benefit of reading groups.
Sample: "Alex grows hysterical observing autograph collectors at the convention in New York. `As if the world could be saved this way! As if impermanence were not the golden rule! And can I get Death's autograph, too? Have you got a plastic sheath for that, Mr. Autograph Man?' (p. 207). What function does collecting and selling autographs serve for Alex?"
Sample: "In what ways can the novel, as a whole, be read as a critique of modern western culture? How do the characters, in the way they live their lives, exemplify this critique?"
If The Autograph Man, written just two years after White Teeth was published, reflected anything, it was Smith's own disillusionment. The novel exuded tiredness and disaffection, which didn't make it an easy read.
On Beauty took her four years to write. During that time, Zadie Smith matured as a writer who was also a sensitive reader and critic, as her classic essay on Kafka and the novel demonstrated. On Beauty reworked E.M. Forster's Howard's End through the stories of the Belseys and the Kipps. Part university novel, part a hilarious dissection of a strong marriage torn apart by two affairs, one played out as tragedy, one as farce, On Beauty's greatest strengths were the strengths of Howard's End. Some saw it as too slight — amusing but ultimately banal. Even so, it made it to the Booker shortlist, and won the Orange Prize. With works by Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith on that shortlist, it was hard to argue that On Beauty had won for any reason other than merit.
Finding her voice
In On Beauty, there's a passage about Claire, a poet and mentor to younger would-be writers: "Claire felt very tired. She was a poet. How had she ever ended up here, in one of these institutions... where one must make an argument for everything, even an argument for wanting to write about a chestnut tree?"
This has been Zadie Smith's predicament. Everything she's written about is placed under the microscope, everything she says is over a live microphone. To judge a writer by the two books written before she even reached the age of 25 is absurd. Smith's talent has never been in doubt, but in many ways, her pilgrim's progress as an author begins with On Beauty, not with White Teeth. Zadie Smith, the oldest new kid on the block, is finally beginning to come into her own.
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