Salon.com > Zadie Smith

Is the novel beyond saving?

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Over the next four Thursdays, Sam Byers is going to take on the state of the novel, specifically the state of the novel today with technology, when everyone thinks technology, the internet and internet-inspired distraction are killing fiction. Read on, and at the end of the month we will be co-publishing the essay as (what else?) an eBook.

NOVELISTS ARE A nervy bunch. This is, in many ways, forgivable, or at least understandable. We’re paid to worry, in both senses of the word. We pick away at stuff. Things bother us, and we, in turn, bother them right back. Since we spend all day worrying on behalf of others, it shouldn’t come as much surprise that when we turn away from the worries we’ve just set down on the page we quickly start sniffing around for something we can fret about in our spare time. And what more appropriate subject than the novel itself?

Literary realism is dead

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

We’ve waited seven years for Zadie Smith’s NW, the same number of years it took Joseph O’Neill to write Netherland and for Tom McCarthy to place Remainder with a mainstream publisher. It’s been four years since Smith pitted these two books against each other in her much ballyhooed (and occasionally derided) New York Review of Books essay “Two Paths for the Novel,” where she put all her bets for the novel’s future on the darkest horse in the race, the anti-lyrical avant-garde.

Novelists fight Internet addiction

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:04:00 +0000

Internet addiction can be especially harmful for those who make a living through intense focus—such as novelists. A number of esteemed writers including Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith have come forward to admit they are powerless over the endless distractions of the Internet, and to name a new solution: two software programs called Freedom and Self Control. These are computer applications that can be downloaded and configured to increase productivity by completely blocking Internet access at specific times. Smith, whose new novel NW features a character addicted to online message boards, thanks these programs in the book's acknowledgements “for creating the time." Novelist Ned Beauman says he finds the web is "good in egalitarian terms that all that information is [available] for free, but the Internet is definitely pandering to our worst instincts.” To protect himself from its siren song, he utilizes an intricate method of restriction to block “virtually all newspaper and magazine websites as well as blogs and Twitter.”

“NW”: Zadie Smith’s neighborhood

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

In the opening paragraph of "NW," Zadie Smith's first novel in seven years, Leah Hanwell, one of the book's central characters, hears a line on the radio and tries to write it down on the back of the magazine she's holding. The sentence is "I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me," and for all I know it's taken from a recent popular song -- "NW" is judiciously sprinkled with glancing references to such things -- so I googled it. It looks like Smith made the line up, but it's already pinging around the Internet, one of those inspirational maxims that so many people like to post to their Tumblrs and blogs.

Leah can't write the motto down, however; all she's got is a pencil and a "pencil leaves no mark on magazine pages." Fitting, since the rest of "NW" is devoted to showing how few of us get to write our lives at will, and how even those who seem to have managed it find the results unsatisfying. The novel takes its title from London's northwest postal sector, specifically the neighborhood of Willesden, where Smith herself grew up. There, Leah met her best friend, Natalie Blake, at the age of 4, when both girls were residents of Caldwell, a council estate -- the British equivalent of a housing project.

Twitter isn’t killing books

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 17:45:00 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I have been thinking through a review of Emma Straub's debut novel, "Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures," a book I enjoyed, but also had issues with. A Slate story published Friday, "Against Enthusiasm" by Jacob Silverman, on the supposed suffocating niceness of the online book world, sent me back to the piece. This is how I concluded it:

Even after she arrives in California, Elsa, now Laura, seems to be in constant search of waiting arms to step into. That constancy of that desire is the emotional core that drives this novel. The prose is crisp and at times, the way Straub describes Hollywood is reminiscent of Joan Didion. Straub has clearly done her research and captures mid-century Hollywood in ways that reveal a great deal of care and attention to detail.

"Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures" is not without its flaws. The title is quite literal and the novel spans Laura née Elsa’s entire life. At times, the pacing feels off, particularly toward the end of the book and some of the plot twists are too convenient, and too easily reached. The trajectory of the starlet discovered by the older producer, who has a resurgent career after fading from the public eye is one we’ve seen before.

While I truly enjoyed the novel, the details rendered so intimately, the sense of time and place Straub captures effortlessly, and the ease of the narration, I wanted more complexity, particularly in understanding the sacrifices Lamont had to make to be a wife, mother, and actress in an industry that demands a great deal from women. I wanted to see more of an exploration of this erasure of the self and how it affected Laura. I wanted a clearer sense of this threat of fracture that is implied throughout the novel but not exploited as much as it could be. I understood Laura Lamont’s outer life but wanted to know more, ultimately, about Laura Lamont’s inner life in pictures.