Zadie Smith?s new novel NW traces the lives of four characters in the gritty landscape of an unforgiving city

NW

Zadie Smith

Penguin

Imprint: Hamish Hamilton

Pg 304

Rs.499

NW by Zadie Smith is her fourth novel and her most ambitious work yet; not because it is experiential in nature but because it follows a path which she proposed four years ago??shaking the novel out of its complacency?. In her 2008 essay Two Paths for the Novel, which appeared in The New York Review of Books, Smith contrasts Joseph O?Neill?s realist novel Netherland with Tom McCarthy?s unusual work Remainder. She preferred the latter, casting askance glances at the staid ?lyrical realism?, which she argues has unnecessarily remained the dominant force in literature for a long time. Smith challenged the tenets upon which realism is built: ?the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self?. NW seems to be an attempt to break away from a comfortable realist mould, to get off from the long, worn road of realism to tread upon a less travelled path. Interestingly for this novelist, all her previous books have been brilliant updates to the ?traditional novel?, which she has decried in the essay; in NW she has executed the Modernist ?constructive deconstruction? almost successfully.

NW, which takes its title from London?s northwest postal sector, is a tale of four people?Leah, Felix, Natalie, n?e Keisha and Nathan?all of whom grew up in the same impoverished part of northwest London, Willesden, where the author herself grew up. It is a multicultural part of the city where the prosperous smacks hard at the moneyless, where the ugly and beautiful, the ritzy and gritty meet and thrive. ?Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never came here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy-piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box.? The fictional housing project of Caldwell, with five tower blocks, each named for a giant of English philosophy: Smith, Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Russell is where these four people grew up and a place from where they interminably try to escape, metaphorically and literally.

This is a novel about urban lives endemic with class and status, the unconscionable truth which every Londoner, New Yorker or a Mumbaikar has to strive off every their living moment. But NW is not just about the ugly gradations of social class, but is also about the undeniable and very flagrantly factual part of our existence: who writes our stories? ?I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me?I am the sole? I am the sole author?. Smith examines this perception with an incisive and sober eye through her four characters in the gritty landscape of an unforgiving city, always in flux.

We have ?Leah, born and bred, never goes anywhere?, Leah Hanwell of the Irish and British descent married to the half Algerian and half Guadeloupean French hair stylist Michel. Leah with the big heart, who is trying to hide from Michel her unwillingness to have a child. She thinks, ?I am eighteen in my mind…I am eighteen and if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will never stop. I?ll never die.? While Leah learns how to live, her best friend is the mother to two beautiful children. The seemingly perfect Natalie Blake, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants, is not just a successful lawyer but married to the rich and handsome Frank. But while she climbs and climbs up the social ladder on the back of her ?mutated will?, she sheds everything about her past, while Leah stayed very much where she was. ?Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she?d stopped being able to speak, or even understand.? The friendship of Natalie and Leah goes far back. They met when they were just four year olds on the Caldwell estate, went to school and college together, but when we are first introduced to them, Leah is annoyed by Natalie?s success, her dinner parties and the manner in which she patronises her.

The friends manage to get out of Caldwell into another realm but their past haunts them wherever their lives take roots. Smith seems to say that there is no easy answer when it comes to ethnicity, background, colour or creed. Natalie fails to summon a sense of identity, is hollowed out and her marriage cracks open and Leah is caught in the web of time: their lives a microcosm of the various inhabitants of NW.

Amidst these, there is Felix, another Caldwell born and bred. He is not introduced to us like the other characters in the novel, we come to know of him through a news item?just another kid from the block?but his story is the most compelling and poignantly narrated. Felix is someone none of them know; he will not meet Leah or Natalie at all but he is the only character we care about. In a dramatic twist, we know what awaits his fate, but we are left in a state of suspense, eager to know when, why and how.

NW opens with a nod to Modernism; a mysterious woman barges into the live of the otherwise quite existence of Leah and robs her of ?30. Passages are strewn with unrelated words, jagged sentences, broken lines and snatches of dialogues, but there is narrative exuberance and Smith?s keen ear for dialogues is on full display. Smith uses a stream-of-consciousness narration, vaguely reminiscent of Clarissa Dalloway and her isolation. But while Woolf?s Clarissa?s draws you in; and you want to take a ?plunge? with her into her intense day of organising a party, Smith?s Leah lacks vitality and her actions seem orchestrated, as also with her Natalie.

NW is clear proof that Smith has left the complacency of her previous works; she has discarded the warmth of the narrative voice. While White Teeth brilliantly negotiated the legacy of colonialism, with a hearty nod to Dickens, and On Beauty echoed with EM Forster?s Howards End, NW felt contrived and unfruitful. Yes, it is a bold attempt at experimentation, in an age where many are asking what next for fiction, and hopefully Smith will succeed in breathing a new life into the violable and obsolete novel form.