Zadie Smith

I guess this should be a general Zadie Smith thread, since there isn't one yet, but mostly I wanted to ask if anyone had seen this NYRB piece of hers, about ... language and multiplicity and Obama, among other things:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22334

(She impresses me more and more, and I'm kind of bummed I finished my grad program right before she started teaching there.)

James Franco, Zadie Smith, who will be next?

I haven't read this essay yet, but it looks promising. Alfred called it "excellent" in a blog post yesterday.

I read an interview with Elizabeth Shue where she said she was planning to go there right when I did, but then skipped out to take a role in something! I would have been pretty psyched to do workshops with Elizabeth Shue.

All I hear about James Franco is that he speaks very LOUDLY, but this is a thread about Zadie Smith and her NYRB piece and how great On Beauty was.

liveblogging but otherwise i forget:

- it's a vintage theme in this country, and pretty much all true so far, except

- "There's no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he's lost his accent." it's *such* a vintage theme, and we forget that the british "literary culture" or "literary intelligentsia" is a scottish, 19th century invention. and within this milieu, keeping one's scots accent has not been uniformly desired, case in point being francis jeffrey, founder of the ur-literary review, the edinburgh. not that he managed to lose it altogether, but just sayin.

I wish I remembered On Beauty well enough to come up with a somewhat adequate post about it. . . but I hated it. It was mega-boring and I loved White Teeth. (And I will also admit reading The Autograph Man). But this essay looks awesome.

White Teeth > On Beauty > The Autograph Man.

On Beauty surprised me by being really really great.

Will have to read this piece, soon.

The thing that amazed me about On Beauty was this: there's a decent number of books that want to have something to do with race, but they tend to symbolize or metaphorize issues about race, which is weird because race is something that people are totally conscious of as they live it -- On Beauty really surprised me by being able to take themes about race and have characters who are actively and consciously living them, and talking about them, in a completely natural way, in addition to having that stuff dramatized in plot terms. This is even leaving alone the fact that she's perceptive about race and would appear to have a firmer grasp on it, just experientially, than a lot of people who want to tackle it in fiction.

I don't know. The conservative father (I forget his name) didn't seem convincingly rendered, and the Howards End parallels forced. Telecommunications and more mixed race relations would seem to have made Forster's "only connect" epigraph more resonant than it was a hundred years ago, but...I dunno.

I read an interview with Elizabeth Shue where she said she was planning to go there right when I did, but then skipped out to take a role in something! I would have been pretty psyched to do workshops with Elizabeth Shue.

This is giving me Hamlet 2 flashbacks. I will need the afternoon to recover.

Wowowowowow. Thanks for the essay link, Nabisco, I like her citations and conclusions.

On Beauty is perhaps the best-edited of her books; most people who do down White Teeth (which I love) cite the cuts they believe the first third of the novel requires...but as for The Autograph Man, meh.

That's a lovely article. I like things like this, celebrating uncertainty and ambiguity. It makes me feel quite awkward when I'm reading or arguing with people who feel passionately about everything, and given that I read the opinion pieces in about four newspapers everyday I often have a nagging feeling of dullness and nothing-to-say. Interesting as these things are, I've come to realise that I don't really care about outcomes very much, so long as things are done right. It's nice to be reminded that this is a strength too.

I haven't read the new NYRB yet (it just arrived yesterday), but Smith's article there in November took my breath away. This is firstly because it's clearly and beautifully written, but secondly and more importantly because it helped with my own ongoing reflection on realism and its discontents in mathematics, which I understand as a narrative practice that in our day is subject to anxieties like those Smith is describing.

I started reading White Teeth recently precisely because every essay or non-fiction piece I've ever read by her has been fantastic. Not as into the novel, but I'll have to give On Beauty a shot after I finish WT.

I really like 'White Teeth'--a big, exuberant, over-long, needed-editing, lots-of-fun first novel. But 'Autograph Man' was unfinishable, and so I couldn't even be bothered with 'On Beauty' (I've already read and loved 'Howard's End, so why do I need to read a pallid knock-off of it?)

it was a good piece. sometimes her pieces in the nyrb drive me crazy, though--she's so smart she feels like she has to make things up when she's doing the lit crit thing sometimes it seems to me. she's obviously a crazy talented writer, and i loved on beauty for a while. it fell apart for me at the end--it was like she was trying to make it a Novel of Ideas or something, and it failed at that. but the characters were fantastic. one of these days she's going to write a perfect novel, i'm sure. (autograph man is horrible; i don't know what happened there.)

ha i feel like this post makes no sense. i have a lot of THOUGHTS about zadie smith. also she read from on beauty at my school a couple of years ago and in addition to being totally beautiful she was very well-dressed, and she read a comic scene and was hilarious and adorable doing it. i sort of hate her and want her life.

White Teeth is horrible book written by one who has not a clue about the subjects of her story (Bengali's, Indians, soldiers etc. etc.)

i was going to start this thread the other day!

i like HER a lot even if i sometimes find her books and essays frustrating. and her personality shines through in them.

for me usually the ratio of good to bad ideas in her work is 3:2 or so

yeah that would have been a shorter way to say what i feel. i'm rooting for her.

this essay is an example of essays of hers that make me crazy because she is straight making shit up:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22083

she has a book of nonfiction coming out called 'fail better'--dunno if its a collection of essays or a book-length study or what

it's like i can't just write a book review, that's too easy and i have all these brains; why don't i construct a grand problem with the novel out of thin air and act like it's a real thing?

is that a "zadie smith" problem or a "new york review of books" problem tho?

http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/failbetter.htm

i thought about that when i was writing that, but nothing about the two paths diverged in a yellow wood for the novel tack she takes in that review is true! wtf is "lyrical Realism" anyway? her characterization of Flaubert is so off i sort of think she did it on purpose just to fuck with me!

this is probably happening all the time in the nyrb but novels are the only thing i know anything about so ;_;

her characterization of Flaubert is so off i sort of think she did it on purpose just to fuck with me!

this is making me chuckle way more than it has any right to

it's like i can't just write a book review, that's too easy and i have all these brains; why don't i construct a grand problem with the novel out of thin air and act like it's a real thing?

It worked for Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen and B.R. Myers.

It depends what you mean by "worked".

i sort of hate her and want her life

Haha, yes. Thinking about her articles, it's the sense of confidence that shines through everywhere and is amazingly attractive - even if she is talking rot (I wouldn't know, I don't know or care what lyrical realism is and I don't think it matters, I just want to read good stories). I need to be a bit more like that

She's definitely impressively ahead of her times, publishing that article on 26 February 2009. Maybe if she finds this thread she can tell us about the events of the next fortnight, starting with this weekend's FA Cup results.

I am quite impressed that she can write long, erudite articles, and will try to find time to read that one, as well as the Lyrical Realism one.

White Teeth strikes me as rather a farrago - a kind of sham, or a frequently ... teeth-grindingly painful performance of what she thinks a cool novel might be, by someone not yet old enough to know better. It is excusable that a 25-year-old should be gauche and foolish - it's not really her fault other people celebrated her so. Maybe she is less foolish now.

The "Two Paths for the Novel" piece grated on me a bit when I read it for reasons similar to what horseshoe said above--"why are we inventing this dichotomy?"

I haven't read the Obama piece yet, I'll have to do that tomorrow.

thats a great essay. i need more time to read it though :( *cuts and pastes*

white teeth i preferred the channel 4 mini series of, compared to the book. i think i prefer zadies articles to her actual novels. i had another book of hers, piece of flesh, which she edited and wrote an introduction for, and i found that more informed than her fiction. white teeth seriously needed editing and just reminded me that just cos someone lives alongside all diff types of people and communities, doesnt mean they actually have any insight into them. everyone seemed a bit thin and scant, like there was nothing really to them apart from surface immigrant cliches (i read it when it came out so cant really remember that well) that you could easily pick up from any other shallow bit of tv or writing about those communities.

basically i prefer her as a kind of literary figure/journalist/lecturer (?) etc to novelist. i still find it dissapointing that this supposed 'voice of modern multi cultural london' came through the exact same oxbridge route as so many others, which might be a reason WT, read so hollow (though not to critics, evidently) after she assimiliated all the things she 'thought she should'. maybe if she wrote white teeth before she changed from her 'willesden' voice to a cambridge one, it might have *felt* a bit more real.

Not to jump on your turn of phrase, but if they were only 'surface immigrant cliches' like those from 'any other shallow bit of tv or writing about those communities,' they wouldn't be as FUNNY as White Teeth is. Like I understand people criticizing WT as a shaggy first book, needing editing, etc., and I understand people reacting to a press narrative that said the book told us something important about multiculturalism in late 20th Century Britain, but let's not forget that there's great comedy in the book, and you don't get great comedy without great characters.

What if you don't think WT is funny? I think it's painfully, embarrassingly glib.

But again: it's better to be painfully glib at 25, and have time to learn to write better, than to be painfully glib at 40-50-60 like Rushdie has been for decades. In that sense I am coming to think that she is a better writer than him. Well, how could she not be?

Although I disagree with your assessment of WT, sir, that you've used this forum as an opportunity to assail the 'venerable' Mr. Rushdie I can only salute for its righteousness.

I read the "Speaking In Tongues" article in the NYRB this morning and it's astonishing. I'm still not sure how to think about having two identities and having them both be true. Her view isn't that that we can choose our identities, that these are all a construct, a la Nietzsche as I read him. Instead, it's that we can be the "I" we are, authentically, but that this "I" can have multiple...identities? sides? It's hard to say. But if it works, it's a way of preserving authenticity talk while promoting pluralism of identity.

'I' is like being a kaleidoscope: all the same stuff is in the tube, it's the perspective which changes how it is seen.

Ok, suzy, that sounds right. But seen by who? Does my own perspective on what "I" I am change? I mean: to what extent does she think we're telling our own stories of ourselves, and to what extent are our stories telling us?

I have just come from drinking pink champagne at a launch, hard to answer and/or type. But the kaleidoscope comparison works for me. I think our perspective of self-identity is completely mutable at all times, even with having a few non-negotiables in yr own narrative.

Also people can we get Zadie timeline right please? Girl wrote WT at 22, the publishers were brought to frenzy by a story in a college anthology which exists as the part of WT where she intros the people at the school.

A couple of nice quotes on the theme:
Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes"
and my favourite:
Keith Richards (on Mick): "Yeah, he's a lovely bunch of guys"

So, we are angrily instructed to be aware, ZS wrote WT at 22? Fine; that just explains all the better why it can ring so callow and false. I'm rereading it now and still haven't found the funny stuff that Gooblar hears in it. But once again, that's not to deny that she may have matured or improved.

I have read half or most of the new NYRB piece. So far it seems fine (and a better essay than WT is a novel): quite unexceptionable and sensible, if a bit self-regarding.

I dunno pf, the NW London she describes in WT is very familiar to me. Or, it completes a picture of something I had half of in an interesting way that makes sense to me. She and I have weird overlaps in subject matter (and potential subject matter) and I don't hate her for it; obviously it does not ring false to me.

Huge, huge difference btwn 22 and 25 - she got the deal before she left Cambridge. It shows in the prologue bit being really long and the ending being a bit meh, but the book builds out from the short story/chapter with the school; most of what's around that is strong and she's funny. FACT: WT was the first big book her recently promoted editor bought/worked on for new employers; I'm pretty sure it was delivered in chunks rather than all at once. Both do much tighter work now, being more experienced.

I bought White Teeth today. Ere I start it, pinefox, what are you taking issue with exactly?

I'm not urging you, or anyone, not to read it. I think I've already briefly indicated what I think is poor about it. I could try to describe it at greater length, though it's hard to believe anyone wants that.

In the NYRB piece, oh, dear:

(Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?)

Hmm, dunno: ask an agnostic.

It feels to me like she enthusiastically learned far too much from bad models, novelists who are always ready to be glib: above all, Rushdie. (That's how the WT text feels, not an assertion from other evidence.) But, again, it may be that she has learned, or learned to emphasize, other things since; I know she values other models.

One thing she repeatedly does: the over-emphatic dialogue pay-off - a character utters (or mutter or sniffs or giggles) an aphorism and the scene ends. Maybe that can be done well, but in her hands, to my ears, it's another bad Rushdie cast-off.

(again, I'm not suggesting that SR was her only model, even in WT; other big modern writers have also been glib and tiresome)

See, I read "Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?" and I want to know more about what she's thinking. I can see why that would rub some people the wrong way, though.

camus: "I do not believe in god and i am not an atheist".

I'm not sure I can explain why that god / belief line annoys me as it does - better leave it; maybe others will feel as I do, maybe not.

But to show that my negativity about ZS is not wilful and endless, let me try to name a few positives about her, as I see it:

1 / she started early, so however had she was, she has / had time to improve

2 / she knows a lot, clearly reads a great deal (though this can be or produce a weakness, in a way, in fiction)

3 / she is a decent liberal with her (political?) heart in the right place

4 / she DOES have talent as a writer - she'll fling out a strong image or phrase quite often; she has some sense of rhythm, poise, sound; she's NOT at all a fake who can't write good literary prose (again this can be misdirected and not work as well for her as it should)

5 / in a sense she's a good storyteller - she is actually readable, keeps things moving, even when they're not intrinsically that interesting

6 / her essays often (and increasingly?) seem thoughtful, learned, stimulating

7 / she is unusual among famous writers, maybe, in being self-critical, and ready to look back on earlier work and say that she sees great faults in it; she has responded to criticism with thoughtfulness and a willingness to learn and improve, rather than mere moneyed arrogance.

sp: [1 / she started early, so however BAD she was, she has / had time to improve]

(Is it not, for example, experientially true that one can both believe and not believe in God?)

please do explain why this line annoys you! I read it and think: yes, this is true. Is it the word 'experiential' that you dislike?

I'd like to explain, though a) I'm not totally sure I can articulate it, b) ilx is a very bad place to try to say anything at length, as it's nowadays a nasty place full of random ad hominem attacks that I find shocking almost every time I read it; someone like that is bound to come along.

A brief foray into it: it seems to me that that one line of ZS a) is false and b) borrows false glamour and mystique from religion - a subject on which everyone nowadays nods sagely and respectfully. No one is going to tell ZS that this piece of (I think) imprecision or mystification is a slice of BS that lets down the broader qualities of her essay - after all, that would be to attack people's 'religious experience', a sacrosanct target.

I don't, on the whole or on reflection, think that one can simultaneously believe and disbelieve in (the existence of?) something. If you substitute some other object (like bacon, Manchester City FC or Zadie Smith) here then maybe the sentence immediately looks sillier. But if you say God then everyone murmurs wisely and folds their arms in admiration.

This is not at all to deny that one can be - deeply? utterly? vaguely? - UNCERTAIN or UNDECIDED about anything, including, for existence, the existence of a god. But I don't think we should invent mysterious new epistemological categories for gods. It would be enough to say: 'many people feel that they don't know whether God exists; sometimes they believe in it more than at other times'.

nb that was one line in what I have thought otherwise a good essay by ZS.

It strikes me that she does have a talent for aphorism. Again, this talent can maybe become a weakness, or be applied in ways that do not do it justice.

I don't think she's introducing new epistemological categories for religion only. She's interested in, as she says, "speak[ing] simultaneous truths". Religion is just her example. Her chief case is identity: can I believe both that I am black and that I am white, supposing that those are mutually exclusive?

Why are they mutually exclusive?

yeah, I don't know, but she seems to think that they are, double consciousness and all that...

Ok I've now finished ZS's article - oh dear, it doesn't seem so good by the end. The 'Halifax / trimmer' section advocates a kind of liberalism and the middle way - fine, but actually not a great aspiration in the political context Obama occupies. ie: he's surrounded by insane right-wingers - yes, he pragmatically needs to satisfy or placate them or fend them off or whatever - but the idea that he should, in his own beliefs, meet them halfway and admit that they have half of the truth is, I think, false.

and then the end is about herself again - come on, surely you can do better than this. And it is bizarre how much she goes on about her posh voice when, as far as I can recall, she doesn't have one (this is part of a big general UK shift that she doesn't mention at all).

(of course Obama - who is a Christian, an American and a politician - might indeed believe that the US Christian / Bush / Cheney / Rove / whatever Right has half the truth - but I don't believe it, and I doubt that ZS does either)

(actually my point is that the US is not evenly balanced between ferocious Left and Right factions, and that's the scenario ZS needs for her liberal / middle-way case to make sense in the Obama situation)

jeezus, chapter 6 of White Teeth is bloody awful, again and again. I cannot sympathize with whatever literary aesthetic it was by which people acclaimed this.

pinefox im not sure i know what you mean by 'glib' in reference to smith or rushdie

i think i do, but i don't agree that it's glib, or at least, i don't think it's unserious.

I read WT too long ago to really argue in detail against the Pinefox on the novel, but I do enjoy PF's generosity in expressing his opinion. Your number 7 point in particular, seems to characterize her intelligence quite well; she's self-critical, not just in being able to admit faults in her earlier work, but in the deep way that marks real intellectual endeavor. Even though I found The Autograph Man a poor novel, it showed ZS to be someone willing to subvert and turn away from all of the things everyone said she was a master of and try to stimulate and nurture another side of her talent. It seemed to show an attempt to *learn* about her talent, to explore its limits as well as its strengths. This humility and curiosity fires the engine of her essay-writing as well.

Also: in all three of her novels, there's a generosity and genuine affection for her characters that is wholly missing from Rushdie's work (or at least SR's work that I've read).

a lot of her essay writing, for better or worse, sort of seems to come across as an extended coming-to-terms with the success of white teeth & her own talented, realized and not

I've been thinking, while having a nosebleed, about why 'affection for characters' is always seen as good in a novelist.

We like people who show affection. We like nice people, generous people. So, these novelists seem like nice people? OK.

But the point must be specifically aesthetic too -- the way people repeat it, there must be an idea that 'affection for characters' is good for a novel.

But is it? My sense is that 'affection for characters' is more of a symptom or clue, or something that's *linked* to aesthetic strengths ... the key strength here, maybe, is: reality; the ability to make coherent (complex? rounded?) characters; imaginative depth. That seems to be one thing that we want from novelists (nb: maybe we sometimes want other things too, like broad comedy). So maybe the 'affection' stuff would tend to occur when those things were in place. The better the novelist, the better at making real people (?), the more likely they are to be affectionate to them?

Maybe - but I still wouldn't want to make affection my main criterion here: it seems like a surrogate for something like 'reality' or 'human complexity' which should really be in its place. And it seems like a somewhat ... riskily one-dimensional surrogate. Reality or human complexity isn't all about affection, after all; some people maybe don't always deserve the same levels of affection. The affection model sounds like it could get sludgy; in a word, sentimental. I think I can see how ZS could do this - even while I'm pretty dissatisfied, on the whole, with his character-creating capacity anyway.

(That's just a digression on a Gooblarian thesis.)

[*her* character-creating capacity]

- it does seem to me in WT that ZS is on one hand, working with the bad Rushdie model of characters (utterly unreal, caricatures, larger than life), while also straining beyond it (or back before it) at a more humanistic model of character. I suppose that from my POV the second element is the richer and more promising, but I don't think she pulls it off here. (maybe she even allows 'affection' to get in the way of 'reality'?)

And then - in that recent NYRB piece on two paths for the novel, she seemed to be retracting from the whole humanistic-character model anyway, so maybe she considers herself way ahead of all this.

believe it or not but when i get round to this im gonna weigh in on the pinefox's side o' this debate.

Affection is good because good writing=real characters, and it's rare that real people are completely unlikeable. Even if the character has nothing but bad intentions (and remember that even Hitler was good with children, kind to animals, etc) you should at least be able to identify with their will to achieve them, which is something very close to affection I'd say. If you live through a novel with a character and can't see any reason to root for them at all, that's bad writing - chances are you wouldn't get very far anyway

there are too many counter-examples one could cite there. who do we root for in (e.g.) dashiell hammett or evelyn waugh?

for me statements like "it's rare that real people are completely unlikeable" are meaningless; or rather, if a novelist is going to attempt to have affection for all their characters, they're going to have to bring you along.

what i find glib in zadie smith is that she takes it for granted, and wants you to take it for granted, that people are inherently deserving of affection.

probably mean 'facile' rather than 'glib'.

people sometimes complain that Martin Amis doesn't have affection for his characters. It strikes me now that, given how vile some of them are, I hope he doesn't, or wish he had (even?) less.

(the MA model of character is somewhat close to the bad Rushdie model, I think, though not the same cos he has his own voice etc)

what i find facile in zadie smith is that she takes it for granted, and wants you to take it for granted, that people are inherently deserving of affection.

she maybe shares this with some kind of new-twee US (literary) scene? - maybe one reason she's popular over there, with the writers I mean.

(one risks sounding misanthropic in pushing this line, VS 'people deserve affection' - but like I said, I fear that 'affection' is a weaker, easier goal than 'reality', 'subtlety', the real goals of, let's say, the realist novel of character.)

nrq, one of the things i was struck by - and liked - abt BENJAMIN BUTTON is that it is a film w/out evil characters, or even evil actions. call me a helpless romantic, but i think that mirrors - on the whole - our life experience: we very rarely encounter ppl who are NOT deserving of some kind of affection, or regard, or consideration, or imaginative sympathy. or, "everybody has their reasons".

that's not to say that contempt and misanthropy can't be hugely entertaining and attractive when well expressed

the more I think about it, the more dubious 'affection for characters' seems as an aesthetic criterion.

just think: you could be a TERRIBLE writer, with 100 lengthy manuscripts piled up in the closet of your bedsit, all of them detailing the exploits of Gadloin the Dwarf and his friends, Herlan the Elf Princess and Magos the Wizard, in the distant land of Alumnia. All of them unpublished - (why? *why* does no one want to publish The Song of Gadloin?) ... and you could have endless, unbridled, gushing affection for Gadloin and co, more of it with every new MS that goes mysteriously unpublished.

I am touched already by this fantasy - I even have affection for Gadloin and co myself, now, and they've only existed for 3 minutes. But surely we don't think that this writer's affection for them (probably more than what Austen or George Eliot felt for their characters) would be a guide to literary merit? Probably the reverse.

"everybody has their reasons"

this (la regle du jeu, non-film peeps) is what i had in mind! renoir convinces me, and so (mostly) does fincher in ccbb. the montage at the end of the film, where benjamin runs through all the characters and who they were, is affection 'done right', i think i'm saying. even things like seeing tilda swinton's character on TV when she's swum the channel -- for some reason i was sold. i think it's because the film was so suffused with loss... you couldn't call it 'rabelaisian', anyway, and that's the key.

(i wonder whether it's the consciousness that the world of 'la regle du jeu' is going to be swept away -- something renoir et al would have known -- that gives it its power...)

(it's funny people say fincher has a gloomy view of the world, imo: in all of his good -- post-se7en -- films, you don't have evil characters, except the possibly-the-zodiac-killer guy.)

(also the fucked-up burglar in 'panic room')

David Fincher > Zadie Smith

Example of ZS eloquently going awry: pp.161-2 of WT: does anyone think this is good?

'- or, to put it in the modern parlance, this is a rerun.'

It doesn't matter whether YOU have affection for your characters, it's whether the reader does. I too have acquired a little bit of affection for Gadloin, because even the tiny amount of detail in your post has characterised (ok, has led me to imagine) him as a noble, frustrated soul trapped inside a drawer in all these dreadful meaningless adventures. But that's your doing - I doubt I'd get that from actually ploughing through these 100 hypothetical manuscripts

I don't, on the whole or on reflection, think that one can simultaneously believe and disbelieve in (the existence of?) something. If you substitute some other object (like bacon, Manchester City FC or Zadie Smith) here then maybe the sentence immediately looks sillier. But if you say God then everyone murmurs wisely and folds their arms in admiration.

ah you see i have always believed that one can simultaneously believe and disbelieve in something - for me 'God' is the provocative alternative to a lot of more prosaic options? I can simultaneously not-believe in superstitions and feel spooked when i walk under a ladder. I can simultaneously believe myself ugly&awful and attractive. I can simultaneously believe that painkillers work and do not work. This is not doubt or uncertainty, or a feat of mental skill: this is everyday prosaic belief, which happens to be in two different things at the same time.

(affection) seems like a surrogate for something like 'reality' or 'human complexity' which should really be in its place.

when a critic writes 'she has such affection for her characters' they do not mean 'she loves and cherishes them as her dearest invention', do they? They mean: she writes an absurd person as if this person too is human and loveable and real. Affection is distant, at a slight remove: to be affectionate toward someone is not to bury oneself in feeling for them, it is to be nice in a way that expresses fondness. But yes it isn't always a good thing: Dickens had affection for some of his characters and no affection for others, and the writing of the characters for whom he had affection slips far more easily into the mawkish.

Klata: I'm touched that you, too, are developing affection for Gadloin. I am now seeing some kind of Calvino / Flann O'Brien scenario with him trying to get out of the adventures and the cupboard.

Gooblar introduced the 'affection' motif:

Also: in all three of her novels, there's a generosity and genuine affection for her characters that is wholly missing from Rushdie's work (or at least SR's work that I've read).
― Leon Brambles (G00blar), Sunday, 15 February 2009

-- on that basis, I thought Gooblar was talking about ZS's affection for her characters, not mine.

(ie: the author's affection, not the reader's)

C sharp: I'm not sure that 'human' should go so readily along with 'loveable'. Lots of people, lots of the time, don't seem very loveable at all. Why not say 'human and hateable', 'human and hurtful' or something?

I don't see eye to eye with you, at all, on the belief question -- let someone else (maybe Magos the Wizard?) take it up.

I think people do talk about an author's affection for his/her characters, but really mostly about its absence, I think meaning the failure to have created rounded people with real sympathies, motives and flaws. Amis is the first name that springs to mind here, but also Ian McEwan - wonderful at writing, but ones who can leave the impression of it all being a glorious exercise, done with nothing to say.

I don't think its presence is much of a filter, I'd assume that having empathy for someone you've created and spent a year writing about would be the default

I've just realized who else it is who likes to say 'Human beings ... they're so loveable ... don't you see? she's loveable and flawed and mixed-up and scared and wonderful ... because ... she's human!'

yes, it's ... TV'S DAVID 'DR WHO' TENNANT !!!

I've been thinking, while having a nosebleed, about why 'affection for characters' is always seen as good in a novelist.

I think we're confusing (or I'm confused by) an author's love and affection for his characters versus creating likeable characters versus creating characters that you can believe in.

The first one is irrelevant to the reader, the second one is overrated and meaningless--but the third one is important and is perhaps the #1 rule to follow when you're making characters up.

there's a lot of talk on this thread about the affection argument and it's pretty silly: how does one measure an author's affection for his characters? is there a scale that one follows? do we really think ZS loved, say Archie in White teeth more than the twins? if so, could we measure it? how about some examples? Otherwise, this is one heck of a strawman you've put together pinefox. Gooblar may have introduced it, but i think you've assembled it.

like i really really think the *only* criteria one should use when looking at an author's characters is: is this character believable or not?

haha I opened a can of worms here

you sure did!

Que, it sounds like you agree with me. I'm not trying to create any straw-men (though I am trying to create dwarves and wizards we can *believe* in) -- I was just directly responding to Gooblar's assertion, which sounded to me not eccentric or unusual but quite a familiar kind of literary judgement, that might be worth examining.

seeing as the admirable Gooblar made that claim in the first place, it would be quite interesting to see him contribute further, though he's a sensible fellow who probably has better things to do.

(also how can I be the one creating a straw target when Ismael Klata and c sharp major have both come out resoundingly in favour of 'affection' as a literary value? If you don't believe in it, take it up with them!)

i think youre misreading c sharp major pinefox; he/she is trying to clarify what a person means by the value of affection and clearly states that "it isn't always a good thing"

I think it's time for Gooblar to deliver his forthcoming paper, 'Reasons To Believe: Authorial Empathy in Nebraska'

I see 'affection', 'empathy' and 'believability' as the same thing because I can't quite conceive of a situation where, in a well-written book:

- there is a believable character who has only negative characteristics
- on reading the book, I don't come to identify with the positive characteristics (and at least understand the bad ones)
- having identified with the positive aspects, I wish that character well in some way

I'm thinking specifically of Macbeth here. Vain, murderous and ruthless, yet it only takes a bit of guilt and fear for me to sympathise with him. That's empathy, yes, but is it also affection? To me it is, because I can't get to empathy without also liking something about the guy. Otherwise he's just a monster, and who cares what happens to the monster?

Yeah sorry dudes today's a bad day to let loose my considerable literary critical skills on this unsuspecting forum. I will say that I *was* talking about authorial affection, and not some idea of readerly affection. I've got no need for admirable characters, but I think I want my novelists to, for example, see the 'good' in their 'bad' characters, even if we can't always. This has less to do with ideas of good and bad and more to do with a method of creating characters who seem to have their own existences, rather than being seemingly willed into existence by the author (which, of course, they have been).

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n20/wood02_.html

In Shakespeare, Pushkin and Tolstoy, Bayley finds a freedom and naturalness to be found almost nowhere else in literature. He delights in their healthy egoism; healthy because they have somehow managed to escape from egoism by sharing it with their characters. No one has written better than Bayley about solipsism in Tolstoy’s world, ‘the simpleness and naturalness of the great open world of self-conceit which Tolstoy knew so well, the world of War and Peace in which solipsism is in reasonable accord with mutuality’.

It is War and Peace, with its epic naturalness and its indebtedness to Pushkinian ‘lightness’ that clearly absorbs Bayley, much more than the more obviously European Anna Karenina. Bayley explicates, with marvellous tact, how ‘Tolstoy and Pushkin possess their characters though they do not control them.’ An example offered, and an example also of Bayley’s own sensitivity as a reader, is the way that Tolstoy hardly bothers to provide his characters with personal and psychological histories: ‘Tolstoy seems instinctively to feel that a character’s past life is a kind of reality, a reality which the author has no right to possess himself of. A novelist should not have it both ways, owning past and present: Tolstoy confines himself to what he can make of a character from the moment he creates him.’ Like Shakespeare, he can ‘afford to ignore the lesser writer’s necessary claim to every sort of access to character and motive’.

For Tolstoy, Bayley suggests, creation of character was not really a voluntary act, a willed thing; it was something he almost could not help, and his favourite male characters, like Stiva Oblonsky or Pierre Bezukhov, or even, in a way, Napoleon, share with Tolstoy this infectious, involuntary solipsism: they cannot help being themselves. It is the same with Tolstoyan comedy: ‘In general we feel about Tolstoy’s humour that he is not concerned with it himself, and probably rather despises the notion, but that it comes out from under his hand involuntarily when his narrative is at its best.’ This is very subtle, and similar subtlety is brought to bear on Tolstoy’s superlative use of detail. Detail is not lovingly fondled and fetishised as it is in Flaubert or Nabokov or Updike; it is always on the move: ‘At their best, Tolstoy’s details strike us neither as selected for a particular purpose nor accumulated at random, but as a sign of a vast organism in progress, like the multiplicity of wrinkles on a moving elephant’s back.’ At moments like these, Bayley seems to see literature from the inside, as writers themselves do.

Tolstoy, like Chekhov, makes most writers seem forced, hysterical, self-indulgently ‘stylish’. I have learned a great deal from Bayley’s commentary on Tolstoy and Pushkin, and am in large agreement with his derived Tolstoyan prejudices. Once one has read and reread the Tolstoy book, and Bayley’s superb comparative commentary on Pushkin, and his readings of Othello and The Golden Bowl in The Characters of Love (1960), one is inclined indeed to find the Tolstoyan law of creation the supreme fiction. And though Bayley’s sense of mimesis is obviously enough a realist one, it is not uncomplicated, resting as it does on two kinds of escape: the artist’s escape from his own work (the paradoxical escape of the generous, character-creating egoist); and the work’s escape from the world – the way in which great art creates its own rules and vision. Bayley writes approvingly of Paul Celan’s poems, which create their own ‘absolute vision’, and of the way Auden’s work is a magic that ‘completely enchants and dispossesses what it celebrates’. The great work of art, in Bayley’s ideal, seems to relate to the world as the great fiction-maker relates to his characters: it possesses the world and then sets it free.

trying to understand zs appeal. ive just got part of white teeth and some essays/criticism to go on. its maybe the promise of a public intellectual whos a reasonable intelligent self conscious real seeming person not a weirdo megalomaniacal rhetoric volcano. im generally in agreement w/her but never blown away by omg amzing insights and her thinking out loud style is pretty hard to take sometimes. i could see her in ten years once shes tightened up her writing and embraced even lol huegr ideas being a super prominent columnist/tv personality or whatever it is well call it then - a blogger?

eh i think she is not that impressive as a public intellectual, though not for lack of brilliance. the things she's good at are in her fiction--writing good characters and writing about the lived experience of race. i haven't read white teeth, but i guess autograph man, while not doing the facile thing with language that pinefox dislikes, is plenty glib in concept. also terrible. i think, though, that i am twee in the way pinefox and enrique are critiquing so i doubt i have much perspective on this affection for characters thing.

i don't really think she's written the novel she's capable of yet, but on beauty is promising.

it's OK to be twee, in lots of ways! I didn't actually say ZS was twee - the word doesn't capture her (good or bad) at all. if you're actually twee then I probably like you more than I like ZS.

okay. i admit to skimming your posts but i will go back and read them more carefully! i do just like the ostentatious rushdie-esque prose thing that you hate, but i am not trying to get into an argument about rushdie in this thread.

http://www.littlehits.com/uploaded_images/softies-749467.jpg

Salman Rushdie, yesterday

I have this feeling something else might be being mistaken here for "affection for characters" -- probably said this before, but to me a lot of the appeal of White Teeth was the apparent joy the author was taking in writing it. (I think this accounts for some of the comparisons to Midnight's Children, actually, another book where it feels like the author is totally exuberantly psyched at the fact of being able to make stuff come alive on the page.) I don't know that that's some big argument for why the novel should be valuable to everyone, but that's part of why it's likable to me. That's the plus of its being written by a 22-year-old. There are times when I'll pick it up and read a bit just to remind myself of how the act of writing should be fun -- to reconnect with the sheer fun of the creation that underlies all these decisions about what's "good" or what "works" or not. Maybe that's has to do with what Pinefox finds glib about it, but I remember, at the time, being excited about having the Exciting Debut Novel everyone was talking about actually be something that was big and messy and bursting with energy.

I think the failure of Autograph Man had everything to do with her sudden feeling, after that, that it was incumbent upon her to be serious and literary and have glammier straight-haired author photos, a transition that was ... necessarily but clearly resulted in an awkward phase. Although I remember at the time kind of turning on her, feeling like she'd given up this great messy scrappy joy-in-writing thing and traded it in for trying to be good in a way that I wasn't sure about.

she has a book of nonfiction coming out called 'fail better'--dunno if its a collection of essays or a book-length study or what

Was this Beckett, the FAIL BETTER? I had that written on a card above my desk for a while.

yeah, "exuberant" is definitely the word i'd use to describe the style of midnight's children. i really need to read white teeth to participate in this conversation, but assuming it's like midnight's children (which i reread last year and it totally holds up for me) i would probably like it.

rereading this thread i keep wanting to defend rushdie but i think it's probably pointless since exactly the thing i like about him seems to be the thing people find glib. he hasn't written a good book in a long time and i doubt he ever will again but midnight's children is the real deal imo.

xpost - I don't know if the above helps at all in really naming the quality we all seem to agree we're talking about. I can certainly see how it's not to everyone's tastes, but to me, when done well, it's a great energy, and the twee-band joke almost fits -- it's not unlike the charm of the scrappy exuberant basement band (vs. the charm of the big grand dramatic rock band that knows exactly how to do what it's doing). I can be drawn into that. I don't feel like breathless sentences or "oh and THEN what happened" plotting or sudden metaphorical earthquakes ... I don't feel like they're showing off or beating me over the head with anything, I feel like the author is full of energy and joy and I get some of the same out of reading what comes out. Matter of aesthetic preference, obviously.

the thing about midnight's children is that it's got that style that can read breathless and overblown to some people (again, i love it) but it's not a silly book. that's why the "glib" charge seems wrong to me.

http://brooklynheathen.com/200801/zadie-smith-mcnally/

I don't think ZS is twee, though I seem to have introduced the word earlier, in a specific context.

xpost - Horseshoe, White Teeth is a really different book, and not nearly as good, but yeah, it has that same energy sometimes! There might be a circumstantial thing involved: didn't Rushdie do Midnight's Children as his last chance at becoming a writer? I feel like that was the story -- his previous manuscript hadn't gone anywhere, he was giving it one more shot, and the result seems to be that he was enjoying it and letting himself run free, letting the energy go wherever. White Teeth was finished after an insane bidding war and a whole "hey okay kid, you're a big novelist now, get to it," and I wonder if some of the same feeling might have been involved -- a sort of rushed, happy, do-whatever feeling.

I think a lot of the differing reactions to it depend on how you place yourself with regard to the writer, maybe? Or maybe not. Whether you imagine all their breathlessness to be an act played on you, or whether you interpret it as a writer just joyfully getting things on the page?

i gave up on white teeth party because of the like midnights children but not nearly as good angle - its kinda a petty complaint but it bugged me

I think a lot of the differing reactions to it depend on how you place yourself with regard to the writer, maybe? Or maybe not. Whether you imagine all their breathlessness to be an act played on you, or whether you interpret it as a writer just joyfully getting things on the page?

ding ding ding

Sure ZS might have felt joy in her writing -- I bet she did. But it doesn't follow that anyone should feel joy in reading it. They're two different events, as far as I can see. Unless you (already?) like the kind of thing ZS is doing (whatever that is), you're not going to get much out of her pleasure in it.

I can imagine a heavy metal band (all 22 years old) whose joy in playing together shines through in every power chord and twiddly note ... I'm glad they're happy, but is that gonna make me like HM?

Or: you could give me a couple of bottles of wine, make me drink them both in an hour flat, and then put a 12-string guitar in my hands and order me to play 10 Smiths songs in a row. I'd probably quite enjoy that. But I don't think you would.

you know what i would enjoy right now

for people who dislike white teeth i keep wanting to recommend on beauty except it's deeply flawed, too. i recommend the first 3/4 of on beauty. at least it doesn't do the prose thing you dislike, pinefox! also i guess if you already dislike her writing you might be loath to read more, which i really can't argue with.

xposts okay pinefox but that's just belaboring the aesthetic preference difference. i think maybe there's nothing more to be said.

xpost - Yeah, pinefox, like I said, I don't think that's something that should be valuable to everyone. Same goes for any shambly happy rock band I like. But it is a joy that some of us share with the writer. I'm mostly defending the motives of it, which see below:

Also, in defense of "hysterical realism" ... I admit that I often think about this from a writing point of view rather than a reading one, which isn't really a good perspective, but ... there is a lot of blank space at the end of the page and you can put anything you want in it, and you sit alone writing something you're not sure anyone will ever, ever read, and I can totally understand the impulse that emerges -- I think it is a fundamentally generous impulse, and not a show-offy one -- where you think ... well, you want things to be serious, you have serious things you want to say, but you are also sitting alone in your room typing forever and you think: if I can put a joke here, if I can say what I want to say using a talking penguin, if I can have a hurricane in this bit, well, it's the least I can do to entertain both myself and any hypothetical readers I might ever have. This is not always artistically the best impulse, obviously. Often you don't need those things, often they're distractions and not gifts. I absolutely understand getting annoyed with them. But I feel pretty confident saying the impulse isn't some needy cry for attention or something the author is holding over the reader's head; I think it's just a stab at magic, an effort to bring joy to things.

an effort to bring joy to things

^^very very important in my opinions

if you're actually twee then I probably like you more than I like ZS.

:(

(So long as I'm rambling I would also suggest that that impulse has to do with the form of the novel itself and the rise of things like film and TV as ways we consume our narrative. What is it that novels can do that visual narratives can't? And the stuff that gets labeled "hysterical realism" tends to contain a good number of exactly those things, the stuff you can think of and throw on a page that you can't in any other medium.)

What is it that novels can do that visual narratives can't?

The inner voice. The thing is, a lot of the rules I've picked up about writing ('show don't tell', that sort of thing) seem like a move away from dealing explicitly with the inner voice. Yet War & Peace is full of bits telling you exactly what the characters are thinking and feeling

okay slowly reading through this thread:

what i find glib in zadie smith is that she takes it for granted, and wants you to take it for granted, that people are inherently deserving of affection.

i don't think this is true! maybe i'm confusing my hatred of one of the characters in on beauty for smith's take on him, but she at least presents his flaws in clinical detail.

so much to respond to!

What is it that novels can do that visual narratives can't?

The inner voice.

haha isnt this what smith is arguing against in her nyrb essay? that the self constructed in a really real realist novel isnt "really what having a self feels like"? that "if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject"?

"if it's to survive, lyrical Realists will have to actually come into being"

I think the failure of Autograph Man had everything to do with her sudden feeling, after that, that it was incumbent upon her to be serious and literary and have glammier straight-haired author photos, a transition that was ... necessarily but clearly resulted in an awkward phase. Although I remember at the time kind of turning on her, feeling like she'd given up this great messy scrappy joy-in-writing thing and traded it in for trying to be good in a way that I wasn't sure about.

its been too long since i read it but i never felt like autograph man was a failure and it was the most... endearing of her books, to me. i guess in retrospect there's a v. self-conscious working out of these ideas of self and identity that's facile and forced and, yes, awkward.

but when you talk about "trying to be a good in way that i wasnt sure about" i admit there was a kind of... grasping (?) there that i responded to yet i dont think or never read it as trying to be "good". i kept thinking and nrq reminded me of jaques becker saying that "all you can tell on the screen is the story of yourself" and autograph man read like an attempt to both reject and accept that. like an effort to be "real" to answer those incredibly difficult questions she poses in her nyrb article about netherland.

and i mean obv she didnt fully succeed in answering those qns or soothing the anxieties of realism but what novel does, ever? but even more than on beauty i thought the attempt was worthwhile, and interesting, perhaps because it was so uncertain and anxious. and it def helped that there was "affection" there that she didnt preclude the possibility of redemption no matter how glib and pat it is.

nabisco, the quote is from beckett--she uses it in the essay i posted above

i dont like using the word glib to describe rushdie or smith because it implies that theyre somehow insincere, which i think they are the opposite of. i cant think of very many more earnest writers.

well some of the stuff in autograph man, particularly the stuff with alex in nyc, was glib in the "not thought through" sense but yr right they are completely in earnest

i dunno did u read fury

i think rushdie has gotten glib in his late novels but midnight's children is about everything that ever happened. it has heft.

btw alex in nyc is featured in a zs novel ???

yeah i can buy them as glib in that sort of--super talkative, speak before you think way--and maybe even "shallow" but i wonder if the kind of shallowness on display in rushdie & smith is an asset and not a weakness--but theyre not used car salesmen, you know--theyre the smartest kids in class who cant stop having ideas

that was a "killing" joke, joe

midnight's children isn't shallow. i think on beauty sometimes is, but only really at the end. i think how smart she is is actually a problem for Smith, but i think she'll relax eventually.

theyre goths right xp

yeah i can buy them as glib in that sort of--super talkative, speak before you think way--and maybe even "shallow" but i wonder if the kind of shallowness on display in rushdie & smith is an asset and not a weakness--but theyre not used car salesmen, you know--theyre the smartest kids in class who cant stop having ideas

i dont want to argue about rushdie because ive only read midnight's children and that only once but with smith i def do think its an asset. its what i like about autograph man that messy outspilling of ideas some of which are marginal and some of which are "omg amazing insights". forced around narrative they can seem kind of implausible, glib, facile and the story at the heart of autograph man is pretty weak but i think that "cant stop having ideas" feeling is there.

which is why im getting hung up on horseshoe and nabisco not liking it esp nab's "she'd given up this great messy scrappy joy-in-writing thing"

i guess i have a particular thing i want to see from smith, a certain kind of realim, and i see the autograph man as her trying to run away from it. maybe i overreacted to it because it was the first thing by her i ever read and i actually wasn't sure if she was sincere or not. it sort of read to me like an extended mockery of the idea that race and ethnicity have some sort of real relationship to identity--it turned that idea into a game with endless iterations?

This thread has developed in a direction that makes my POV eccentric to it -- that is, it's now full of people who admire ZS (and not just recent essays but WT). Still, I'm still rereading the first novel, and still stumbling over the irritations. Does anyone think that pp.210-11 (Penguin) are good?

'Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made'.

'Glib', a word kicked much around above, seems a good adjective for this, though maybe it spurs less polite ones too.

kicked much around? much kicked around, I think

are you re-reading the whole thing?

Yes.

Quick clarification w/r/t "what only the novel can do" -- I just meant I think this question is somewhat responsible for a lot of the more "talking cheese" aspects of what Woods called hysterical realism. Inner voice was already pretty well camped on by modernists, but using your godlike authorial powers to inject absurdities and Cervantes-level coincidences and relentless physical metaphors and other stuff that does not easily fly in more, umm, concrete narrative media ... I understand the impulse, is all I mean, and it makes sense to me as something that would appeal to writers/readers in the era it has.

Pardon me, WOOD

I was just thinking (while Russell Davies plays some 1930s show tune and I drink Peroni and cook pasta) that it might be quite interesting for me to watch the C4 TV version of WT now.

Why? Well, just the renewed familiarity of the book. But also - yes, I think I could agree with whoever it was was upthread who said this might be better as a TV adaptation than as a novel. Cos I think its action, narrative, plot, whatever could come across on TV - and I don't think it would suffer from losing the other stuff: the bad and laboured meditations and disquisitions, etc.

I was also thinking again about this question of the novel form's powers (vs film etc) -- Klata or someone said 'inner voice', but actually just *voice* would do: it needn't be inner or psychologically motivated by characters. WT has a lot of voice, most of which I wouldn't call 'inner', and it's something that is presumably absent from the adaptation.

Nabisco's point re. motivation for hysterical realism might be accurate, in which case it's ironic that H.R. feels (or is often called ... by me, at least) 'cartoon-like' -- ie like a TV / film / visual animation / whatever.

I didn't think this book was going to get worse, but it's happening -- pp.216-7, stunningly, dismayingly bad. Or that terribly ominous sentence on p.213 beginning 'But on the seventh day came light' -- when it reaches its end, what fearfully ill-judged derivativeness we are plunged into.

why are you reading a book if you don't like it/or think it's bad, may i ask

He's (admirably) checking/testing his remembered opinions.

i am enjoying the liveblogging! lols @ "I didn't think this book was going to get worse, but it's happening'

the zappening

Thanks, my dear fellows - that is generous of you, in a way one does not expect to see on ilx nowadays.

What just struck me (and I may seem to be repeating myself, as we all do, so much of the time) is that what's bad about ZS here (WT) isn't original, her own ... it's incredibly derivative and second-hand. That's one reason I suppose that I can't share Nabisco's wide-eyed-young-authorial-exuberance angle (though in theory it does make some sense) -- in a sense WT is not wide-eyed and fresh enough, it's too steeped in bad habits already established by others.

I don't necessarily pose this as disagreement, but ... that can be part of the wide-eyed-young-authorial-exuberance thing, can't it? To pick up our earlier music analogy, the hyper teenage band in the basement tends not to be playing anything you haven't heard before; there's just a charm in the recklessness with which they leap out into it all. "But on the seventh day came light" -- this seems like the kind of language you approach that way, gleefully trying on a whole lot of registers and finding some small thrill in using ones that are almost ... mock-heroic, mock-biblical, grand for the fun of it.

(I am possibly a bad person to talk about this stuff, because ... well, I find it hard to explain without making analogies to indie music, but there's a whole realm of young amateurish writing I find endearing; I think of collegiate fiction-workshop writing almost as a distinct genre with its own distinct charms; I don't know how much of this is operation with my liking White Teeth. That's clearly not all that's going on, though, because plenty of people loved the book, and I'm pretty sure this impulse of mine isn't, like, shared -- lots of people have it with music, but coming at writing in that way, being charmed by certain flaws, is usually a hard argument to make.)

i like her a lot ... i even liked autograph man ok

gleefully trying on a whole lot of registers

I am easily taken by this kind of thing, too, even if it ultimately falls flat.

i am going to start white teeth tonight with a special eye to the passages pinefox mentioned.

I'm now on about p.309. I was going to refrain from posting what might seem unprompted, merely self-answering bile to this thread, and assume it might not revive, and let sleeping cats lie. But seeing as the thread is back, I hope it's OK to say that the further the book goes on, the more it shocks me with its awfulness. Or maybe it's that the awfulness is - constant? - no, not quite constant, but very recurring, consistently coming back, and really surprising me with how incredibly bloody awful it is. I have felt the need to send people, several people, text messages just to tell them how unbelievably terrible this book is (no, they don't hate or shun me for this, not all of them).

I meant all I said upthread re. the 7 good things about ZS, but those good things are well-hidden in this terrible farrago of a book - so well-hidden I feel I was too generous (just as, incidentally, James Wood is way too generous in the Hysterical Realism essay, which I've also just reread yet again). It is hard, faced with some of the clunkers, bad borrowings and dreadfulnesses, to think that their perpetrator deserves the benefit of the doubt or another chance, another book contract or even a first book contract. I really have concluded (provisionally concluded? I still have c.230pp to go) that this is one of the worst (say ten worst) books I've ever read.

(ps / one thing I'll say for ZS, though: she actually anticipated my bad fantasy adventure motif! check out the first full sentence on p.302)

I thought On beauty was great, one of the most refreshing novels I've read by any contemporary author, Autograpgh Man wasn't as good and still haven't read White teeth yet.
She's one of the most impressive currently living writers there are, and her columns and essays are usually good reading as well.

i dont know if i understand all the talk about hysterical realism. even in white teeth i dont think smith is guilty of the "false zaniness" that wood writes about. if anything i think she's closer to the sin of "knowing about things" about trying to write tellingly about systems and the street &c instead of about people.

"think of collegiate fiction-workshop writing almost as a distinct genre with its own distinct charms; I don't know how much of this is operation with my liking White Teeth. That's clearly not all that's going on, though, because plenty of people loved the book"

I took an awful lot of fiction workshops when I was in college at Berkeley in the early 90's and if anyone had ever written anything as good as White Teeth I would have expected them to have gotten a book deal as well. I'm not going to go on and on about pinefox's objections but I honestly don't find the book poorly written at all; I can only say there is no accounting for taste.

i totally didn't start white teeth. :( tomorrow

"false zadieness"

I'm totally with you on that, akm, workshop-wise -- you definitely do not see White Teeths in workshops -- but something about the energy of it actually does remind me of the sort of thing someone would bring into a collegiate class, making everyone sit back and say wow, geez, you really have something going here. (Which is pretty much what happened with a collegiate Smith and the publishing world, right?)

Suddenly I'm really curious about how zaniness can be "false" -- "forced" I would understand, but "false" seems like ... it's not really zany and just pretends to be? Is that it? There's a definitely a level of wackiness to White Teeth, which, like I said above, seems like its motives are basically generous, an effort to entertain and make jokes. I know Smith herself has kind of disowned that impulse -- wasn't there some quote from her about looking back on it and feeling like its author is a 9-year-old on a stage frantically telling jokes and doing cartwheels and trying to entertain? Or maybe that was someone else's metaphor about her.

hey guys I didn't read this thread but I bet you talk about race and class rite?

technically incorrect

Suddenly I'm really curious about how zaniness can be "false" -- "forced" I would understand, but "false" seems like ... it's not really zany and just pretends to be? Is that it?

well your beef is with the j.wood article you keep citing but my reading would be that he uses "false" instead of "forced" to put emphasis on what he sees as the inherent dishonesty in this writing. the zaniness isnt fake so much as way of playing the character/novel/reader for a mug

ugh idk i'm barely literate but i think the false is operating on the level of intent rather than effect

(I should just re-read the Wood piece, but that strikes me as a level of ... I dunno, some form of trying to detect motives symbolically based on one's own personal understanding of the purpose of the novel, and then projecting that onto the real world in a way that, Occam's-Razor-wise, gets beaten to a pulp by "she was trying to be fun/funny")

yah i'm basically arguing against myself here - i dont buy into his "hysterical realism" argument esp as it applies to white teeth. i think your all-singing all-dancing/workshop line is off as well but at least it mostly holds together w/r/t white teeth

* dont buy into for the reasons you mention. wood is a good critic imo but he has a limited way with stuff that operates outside his paramaters of how fiction works

Yeah, I just re-read the original review in question, and the thing that seems missing from it is that he never, in his slight broadside of this type of novel, puts much thinking into what this sort of thing does offer, why writers might gravitate to it, what it says about people's sensibilities (even if it says something bad!), or what it's doing there -- he makes a compelling case against it, but it's the kind of case where if you feel like if you asked him why it exists or why people like it, might just throw up his hands and say he can't imagine.

Also, amusingly, there's a bit in the beginning of the piece where Wood throws out a little caricature of the sort of novel he's talking about --

If, say, a character is introduced in London, call him Toby Awknotuby (that is, "To be or not to be" — ha!) then we will be swiftly told that he has a twin in Delhi (called Boyt, which is an anagram of Toby, of course), who, like Toby, has the same very curious genital deformation, and that their mother belongs to a religious cult based, oddly enough, in the Orkney Islands, and that their father (who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth), and that Toby's mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979 and has not spoken a word since. And all this, over many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!

... and sadly enough, my main thought while reading this is to kind of chuckle and think wow, nice, James Wood, a couple of those are interesting ideas and sound like something I would read.

He's absolutely right about a lot of the problems involved -- hell, a few years ago I threw out a half-finished novel I was writing because it was turning out too much like this, and I knew it and didn't like it, could feel myself falling into every trap he discusses in this thing -- but I would totally defend the impulse, for obvious reasons. I mean, it's an impulse I absolutely have and have had to work really hard to overcome.

i think a little bit of that stuff goes a long way--it's great interesting material, but there's a cumulative effect. funny stuff though!

(who was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima) has been a Hell's Angel for the last thirteen years (but a very curious Hell's Angels group it is, devoted only to the fanatical study of late Wordsworth)

He should have made Toby's last name Arnotaby or something more obvious, and then ditched the (that is, "To be or not to be" — ha!).

someone should write that book just to spite him

And all this, over many pages, before poor Toby Awknotuby has done a thing, or thought a thought!

^^^ this seems central to his real problem with the style and what i was trying to get with my explanation of the use of "false"

there was another article in the guardian by wood where he draws a line through delillo and social realism to the "hysterical realism" that he lumps smith in with and that was useful to me for understanding the - aims, maybe, of this type of novel. more for authors like franzen, in particular but i thought it was a better attempt at describing how this stuff operates

i wonder if you could trace back to the composite books he's half-thinking of, like:
he has a twin in Delhi = god of small things
was born at the exact second that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima= maybe midnight's children
has the same very curious genital deformation = middlesex, cereus blooms at night, the double?
Toby's mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb = uh, middlesex? idk

he's on to something because i recognize these types without recognizing the specifics

Oh, there's no doubt he's fingering a recognizable type, no doubt at all. Most of those things would reflect on plenty of individual books, though the born-at-bomb-drop thing would seem to be pretty clearly thinking of White Teeth's connections to Midnight's Children. Or course, as horseshoe's been (sort of) saying, the whole linking of characters to historical events in Midnight's Children is definitively not just some kind of forced zaniness, it's part of the engine and subject of the novel in a way that's not nearly just about style or sensibility. It's the whole project, in certain ways.

nabisco i will totally pay you to turn my lazy half-implied suggestions into explicit prose. i think that's the reason i get so defensive about midnight's children.

i mean, about claims that midnight's children is just an excercise in zany prose.

"she was trying to be fun/funny" gets beaten to a pulp by "she was failing to be fun/funny"

It's true that Wood doesn't dwell much (as in complaint upthread) on what might be good about this kind of novel - maybe he felt that a lot of other people had already done that, by their own lights, and it was more important to point out what he thought wasn't good about them. I think he does a very good job of this, but is genuinely hampered by being so misguidedly generous to WT. I think if asked now he might say that this praise was over the top, especially as ZS (with whom he's appeared on varius panels) has pretty much agreed with his criticisms. Early in this piece
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/oct/13/fiction.afghanistan
she virtually disowns the novel, published only a year earlier. At least, she is more negative than positive about it.

It's not true that Wood doesn't give any reasons why people would write this way. He sees it as reflecting the problem of character in general, of imagining or believing in fictional human beings, in the postwar period (and this would presumably be part of a bigger problematics of humanism or something).

(I don't like that last 'or something' - not enough sleep last night; 'or the like' would be more pinefoxian)

(or maybe 'or whatever' would be fine, though it would sound a bit flip ... in fact maybe 'or something' would be better than that after all ... I don't know, need to go back to bed)

But while JW is in the air again - I've just read this critique of him. I think it's quite magnificent, showing me things I hadn't seen in a body of critical work with which I'm quite intimate:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/deresiewicz/single

It all goes wrong in the penultimate paragraph - he suddenly makes some large claims about cultural decline and the wheels come off altogether. Otherwise, probably the best thing ever written on Wood.

This is pretty good too:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2003/07/0079679

That is terrifically well turned, sure, though it's surprising how very positive it is about JW's novel. He even says that it's just the novel one would expect from Wood, which is the reverse of what you said about it.

Haha pinefox "failing" is not a motive --

Also I'm not actually sure that a lot of work had been done in talking about the common impulses behind these sorts of novels, or what purchase they had on people's imagination and sensibilities. I don't begrudge Wood the opportunity to just lay out flat criticism of it, but I'm interested enough in the guy's thinking that I'd actually really like to see him grapple, critically, with the stuff -- I feel like I'm getting a straightforward and compelling argument for why this stuff doesn't live up to Wood's idea of what the novel is for and what it ideally does, but following this there's just ... dismissal, I guess, which seems odd. Whereas if I'm approaching some kind of popular/widespread phenomenon that strikes me as not living up to my idea of how things ideally work, I promise (from now on) that I'll be at least partly wondering what it is people are getting from it that I'm not, and why it exists.

i think a little bit of that stuff goes a long way--it's great interesting material, but there's a cumulative effect.

Yeah, one tidbit like that is fine, but more than a couple and, at best, I feel like I'm being nudged in the ribs by someone who's anxiously scanning my expression to see whether his heavy-handed jokes amuse me. It's a bit like coincidence -- used in moderation, it can be very effective; used in excess, it destroys the coherence of your world and the reader's suspension of disbelief.

i have called nabisco out for having a good attitude about books on another thread (abt dfw i think) but i want to commend him again--

Whereas if I'm approaching some kind of popular/widespread phenomenon that strikes me as not living up to my idea of how things ideally work, I promise (from now on) that I'll be at least partly wondering what it is people are getting from it that I'm not, and why it exists.

i think this is a terrific positive way to think not just about books but about THINGS in general and i award u a gold star

Why thank you muchly, Maximilian

yr essay tho in that case will prob not set the literary world atwitter

Also I'm not actually sure that a lot of work had been done in talking about the common impulses behind these sorts of novels, or what purchase they had on people's imagination and sensibilities.

yah ½ agree i think and maybe because i read that 9/11 hysterical realism essay frist that he does sort of indicate why he thinks writers are writing this way and what the intended effect is but leaves it pretty implicit

this girl did a reading here last season. i didn't go :/

just letting everyone know i looked for my copy of white teeth in order to reread but i think i lost it

Zadie Smith, girl

you'll be a writer, soon

i heard white teeth was OK

pinefox has no interest in Smith; what he really wants is a discussion of James Wood.

well, James Wood is a better critic than Zadie Smith is a novelist, that's for sure

but I'm the one who's already been attacked on this thread for the fact that I'm actually, wow, READING her

if you're so interested in Smith then tell us some interesting ideas about her

i'd be interested pinefox if you gave specific examples of what's bugging you about White Teeth rather than just page numbers. because this kind of stuff to me reads pretty vague

I'm now on about p.309. I was going to refrain from posting what might seem unprompted, merely self-answering bile to this thread, and assume it might not revive, and let sleeping cats lie. But seeing as the thread is back, I hope it's OK to say that the further the book goes on, the more it shocks me with its awfulness. Or maybe it's that the awfulness is - constant? - no, not quite constant, but very recurring, consistently coming back, and really surprising me with how incredibly bloody awful it is. I have felt the need to send people, several people, text messages just to tell them how unbelievably terrible this book is (no, they don't hate or shun me for this, not all of them).

I meant all I said upthread re. the 7 good things about ZS, but those good things are well-hidden in this terrible farrago of a book - so well-hidden I feel I was too generous (just as, incidentally, James Wood is way too generous in the Hysterical Realism essay, which I've also just reread yet again). It is hard, faced with some of the clunkers, bad borrowings and dreadfulnesses, to think that their perpetrator deserves the benefit of the doubt or another chance, another book contract or even a first book contract. I really have concluded (provisionally concluded? I still have c.230pp to go) that this is one of the worst (say ten worst) books I've ever read.

i mean you've said nothing here except you think the book stinks and you've texted some people about it

tbf he's also managed to be superwhiney and defensive for no real reason. gotta give him that

I have kinda wanted quotes, since his English-edition page numbers are of no use to me, but c'mon, I do not exactly expect him to spend all night transcribing sentences just so I can go "I don't see what's so awful about that"

I do not exactly expect him to spend all night transcribing sentences just so I can go "I don't see what's so awful about that"

i don't mean specific passages--i mean quotes from passages and then he tells us what he doesn't like about them

i mean either put up or shut up: quote some of the book, tells us what you don't like about it, why it doesn't work for you (and try not to use the word glib)

Every time we've done that with record reviews it's been like 600 posts of arrrgh

I'm really curious now, though, about whether Pinefox has ever read or talked about Saunders here!

I'd like to explain, though a) I'm not totally sure I can articulate it, b) ilx is a very bad place to try to say anything at length, as it's nowadays a nasty place full of random ad hominem attacks that I find shocking almost every time I read it; someone like that is bound to come along.
[...]
― the pinefox, Saturday, 14 February 2009

pf i think youre an excellent poster even though we disagree about a lot of things but you have to admit that que is not making "ad hominem" attacks here

hey i'm just saying i'd prefer you explain or try to articulate it, that's all. i'd do the same thing if we were in a class together and you were making equally vague statements about why a book wasn't working for you.

i am genuinely interested in why the book isn't working for you and i am not waiting to pounce and jump all over you if and when you decide to explain some stuff out

The syllabus for Zadie Smith's 'Sense and Sensibility' seminar this semester at Columbia.

I finished ON BEAUTY this morning. It's in many ways a tremendous novel, a very large achievement. (The difference between it and WT is so large, so obvious as to be almost not worth remarking in itself -- it's probably more interesting to think about what happens when WT-like material occasionally surfaces in OB, or how OB's handling of hitherto broad things like 'comedy' & 'satire' manages to be so very subtle).

James Wood seems never to have reviewed it - surely a perverse pity, or maybe a very deliberate, conscientious detachment from a scene he wanted to leave to others. In the only comment I can find online he says 'It's a good book, I think'. I think that's faint praise - I think this may be more than a good book. Its orchestration, interveaving, rhythm, pacing, build-up; the deftness with which characters are drawn, with light touches but considerable substance (no doubt a painterly analogy should suggest itself). The nuance of conversation and perception, worthy of Alan Hollinghurst (this is praise, from me). The genuine comedy, gently teased out, funny because not wildly unreal.

I also tend to agree, as it happens, with a comment Nabisco made way back, here or elsewhere: that the novel's treatment of race is quite fine and bold, handling this as a regular fact in people's lives rather than a symbol, an abstracted theme or a reification that defines everything about someone.

Maybe it's natural that one thing I would be suspicious of is the book's depiction of the academy. The US university shown here is so different from any UK equivalent I know that it's not a problem of realism but just an instance of the exotic, the bizarrely and luxuriously other. Some of the scenes between academics are terrifically well done: scenes especially with Jack French, Claire Malcolm and the opening of the Faculty Meeting scene (though this devolves into something implausible).

The one problem here, I think, is Howard. I don't believe that an academic who hated representational art would devote 40 years to teaching and writing about how awful it was, or would be respected or tolerated in doing so. I don't believe, really, that academics in the arts & humanities devote huge parts of their lives to teaching and writing about things they hate and disdain. ZS is pushing this character's tastes and views way too far, to make a general case I suppose about academia's tendency to be dry, cold, detached. Even if there might be something in the general case, it makes too much of a caricature of a very central figure (and caricature was of course among her major, acknowledged, weaknesses). I don't really buy this character's bizarre blithe blindness about his misdeeds and inconsistencies, either. I think he'd be tormented by them, not oblivious.

But I can live with even that character because he's a bit richer and odder than that, and because the book is greater than any of its - often finely written, sometimes likeable - characters. I think this may be one of the best contemporary novels I've read. To read it is to be almost bemused and definitely impressed by how real was ZS's determination to learn & improve, to be the best writer she could be (her dedication must be portrayed somewhat in the character Zora); and to be moved, as she probably intended, by what fiction can be and do.

Wood's review of The Autograph Man evaluates WT too.

when JW says 'it's a good book, i think' he also says 'it seems to me to really make good on her substantial talent.' which i think is stronger praise.

Sensing the anomalous nature of this emotive quality within the university, we have resolved not to speak of it much. We recall the strategies by which FR Leavis secured the novel's status within the academy, treating the novel with circumspection; as if it were not quite a novel, but rather a piece of social history, or an example of moral philosophy, or a mission statement, or a piece of public policy. It did not matter, really, as long as the novel was seen to be treated rigorously and made relevant. Like Leavis, we are not quite sure that the novel as novel will do.

this is surely WRONG in a big way. sure, FRL was quite keen to see novels in history and society, to some degree; sure, he battled for academic rigour in his way. but he was also utterly a man for whom the literary was its own defence; for whom literature was a special category, not to be mistaken for or demoted by another; for whom the novel, as novel, would very much do, better than anything else in the world save, perhaps, the poem.

anyone picked up her new collection of essays?

http://www.cap-one.de/files/data/jaysus_juice.jpg

That guy needs a bigger head.

pinefox is right. she is wrong about leavis, wrong wrong wrong. she isn't helped by her pompous tone there.

though "make relevant" is in some other register.

i didn't realize pinefox came back and posted when he finished On Beauty! thank you, pinefox!

Outside Morton's, waiting for my car back to the hotel, I meet an old actor, a favourite of the late John Cassavetes, who's smoking a cigar and telling me I'm good lookin'. 'He chose me, you see?' he says of Cassevetes. 'Me. It was a thing to be chosen by him, I can tell you that.' He is full of soul and his eyes are rheumy and beautiful. 'This town's treated me well. I was never a star, no one knows my name, but I always worked, and now it's given me a retirement plan. I'm the old dude in any movie you care to mention. Make nine or 10 a year.' He smiles, joyfully.

Who do you suppose this is: Ben Gazzara? Seymour Cassel?

i think seymour cassel sounds like a good guess

Yeah, I just turned up multiple references to/photos of Cassel smoking cigars.

Ha, then again, same for Gazzara.

rheumy eyes + a career playing old men in various movies sounds more like Cassel than Gazzara

not sure why, but i can't see gazzara coming off quite that humble.

Yeah, you guys are probably right.

Cassel is also more prolific -- he had indeed been in nine productions in 2005 (the conversation would've taken place in March 2006), whereas Gazzara was only in four.

new book critic at harper's apparently

(starting next year)

read her essay on Middlemarch from Changing My Mind last night, it was really good

You go, girl: Zadie Smith recorded an essay about the funding of UK public services such as libraries for BBC Radio 4. It's awesome.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9439000/9439821.stm

Such a great essayist.

yeah this was good, then they had this incredible twerp at the end to rebut, some failed tory PPC, who said people who worked in libraries were creaming off loads of taxpayers' money

Terrific essay, and yes that guy giving the counterpoint is a colossal buffoon; his gist seemed to be that whilst both ZS and he used libraries, and he *still* uses libraries for free internet, and there is no real alternative for people without access to books or internet at home, they should all be shut. In other words he is the Wile E Coyote that ZS makes reference to!

new novel out, just like that? reviews are not making it sound great. :/

thx for the heads up, i'll rep for on beauty as one of the best novels of the last decade.

kakutani is kind of dismissive in her review but if her idea that on beauty : howard's end :: new one : mrs dalloway holds up i'm pretty interested.

though on beauty's very overt tribute to howards end was part of its ballsy charm as for whatever reason, in the US at least, em forster is not taken seriously by Serious Minded Literary Dudes despite being super awesome while woolf is beloved of Serious Minded Literary Dudes, or at least the idea of woolf is beloved, of course i am basing all of this on an offhand comment by michiko kakutani who is basically completely wrong even at the best of times so i'll wait til the amazon man comes

she has a jay-z profile in new yorker or new york times recently. that's a very strange form of promoting a novel if that is one. is that a common thing?

“NW,” the title of Zadie Smith’s clunky new novel, refers to northwest London, where she grew up — a multicultural corner of the city that will be familiar to readers of her dazzling debut, “White Teeth.” In that earlier book Ms. Smith took a contemporary London mapped by writers like Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi and claimed it decisively as her own. There are glimpses, here and there in “NW,” of that cacophonous metropolis — a city in constant flux as waves of immigrants and fierce youth reinvent it year by year, day by day — but “NW” is a much smaller, more meager book than “White Teeth.”

it's just like, why do people take this person seriously

wait what person and why shouldn't they? cliffs notes plz

it's from the kakutani review

and because every sentence there is both clichéd and wrong

thank you

I dunno if this is the whole story, but i think kakutani writing a review from the POV of a cat or something might have affected her credibility at some point.

*writes down 'cat review'*

cat review

btw googling "michiko kakutani" brings up a picture of a person who i am pretty sure is hilariously not michiko kakutani in the right hand info box thing. i like to imagine that this is retaliatory SEO from a miffed reviewee.

It's weird: everyone seems to take Zadie Smith seriously as this infinitely wise critical commentator and novelist. But she wrote a very good but flawed debut novel, a really bad second novel, an apparently great 3rd novel (but it was ripping of Forster in a big way), and now this dodgy-sounding 4th novel. plus some pretty crap short stories. So where'd all the respect come from?

the first novel is overrated and the second novel is underrated but then i would say that

i think theres some really good stuff in 'autograph man' even if borders on the grotesque

Admittedly, I couldn''t finish it: maybe the good stuff came later

i think smith's willingness to write a bad novel is part of her charm--like lamp wrote, there's some good stuff in autograph man, enough to keep it interesting imo, and white teeth is just as busted in its way, but she doesn't hide behind Major Youngish Novelist and play it safe/boring as fuck a la franzen or mitchell.

Her Obama essay is good. The Forster-indebted novel is good. She's so young though.

i think smith's willingness to write a bad novel is part of her charm

Yes, but it was hardly a deliberate plan!

the new one was interesting

Snagged a library copy of NW. The reviews are mixed. Anyone read it yet?

i want to because it sounds like a change for her? i've never been totally convinced by her as a fiction writer.

it sounds like she's come down more on the remainder side of the questions posited by that big remainder/netherland review, going by the reviews.

I read On Beauty exactly seven years ago in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma, trying to figure out how she could get the parallels to Forster so wrong.

My gf likes her, but I haven't read her yet. Found this preview of a reading she did of interest:

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43335/zadie-smith-at-sixth-i-thursday-oct-18/

Here's part of it:

The larger cultural conversation seems to be able to stomach only one Serious Novel every year, which makes Smith’s newest one, with the usual reviews and essays as well as multitudinous NPR appearances and online-journal considerations so exhaustive they feel like TV-show recaps, this year’s Freedom. That’s because NW is Smith’s first book in eight years, following On Beauty, which we—the effete liberal crowd—all sort of ignored because we cared more for the importance and gravity and bombasticness and precociousness of her first novel, White Teeth. This is also because NW addresses class, race, wealth, public housing, childhood friends, and gentrification. In a world that can’t get away from any of the above, we’ve latched onto NW to soothe our social-justice consciouses (Smith identifies the race only of her white characters. Subversive!). Though a not-small number of critics has quibbled with it (on Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan called the book’s ending “preposterous”; a Guardian blog post mocked Smith’s prose, which occasionally resembles a car crash between James Joyce and e.e. cummings), NW is undoubtedly the year’s biggest literary release.

http://i.imgur.com/izHYs.jpg

The larger cultural conversation seems to be able to stomach only one Serious Novel every year,

*barf*

yeah, that's groany

I might be out of touch w/ british book talk, but I don't feel like I've heard quite as much about this as I thought I would. Obvs it was pushed quite hard (only book I've seen flyposters for on walworth road) but I'm not really hearing discussion, enthusiasm that much.

Read the first couple of chapters of this but wasn't really grabbed. Find it a bit dubious, these mid-career Brit novelists like ZS and Will Self acting all "well, we've always had a dance Modernist element to our writing". Is it all down to that Josipovici book a couple of years ago?

I suspect that's probably because it'll turn out to not be all that good. Which would be a shame - I still haven't read one of hers and I'd like to; I was sorry it wasn't chosen for our book club. I like her essays, I'm interested in the idea, I've liked the briefest descriptions of NW that I've seen ... but I've browsed it a few times now and nothing has even begun to grab me.

this book wasn't very good. it's not even a "bad novel" like i was talking abt upthread, it just works the same ol zadie smith themes with the same ol zadie smith characters until i just don't give a f anymore.

Was an xp; Stevie's beaten me to it.

xps

I think there's been a more general dissatisfaction with The Retreat From MODERNITY in the air for a while? The josipovici book caught something that I felt was around in various forms - cult of Bernhard, Remainder, idk what else.

tbf to the Self his sounds like it might be using modernism to talk about modernism historically, which has piqued my i.

tbf to the Self his sounds like it might be using modernism to talk about modernism historically, which has piqued my i.

by which i think i mean there's a nostalgia for difficulty or kitsch of modernism or attachment to the signifiers of seriousness that this kind of thing can topple into, and it sounds like Self might be taking that on. Still unlikely to read it, but it's not my ignore list.

on my ignore list

nostalgia for difficulty or kitsch of modernism

i got the first inkling of this w/ coe's bs johnson biog

I'm enjoying NW a lot, but it's my first Zadie ever and I don't read tons of modern novels, so.

Finished NW and not sure what I thought about it. I loved White Teeth, loved aspects of Alphabet Man, never read on On Beauty, love many of her essays. I wanted to like this much more than I did, but it went off the rails for me abut 3/4 of the way in and I'm not positive what the final section was meant to convey

*SPOILERS*

were we to believe Nathan killed Felix? Or just that, Nathalie and Leah, wanting so badly to distance themselves from their past, turn Nathan in as the killer, despite his having nothing to do with it? Either way, it wasn't very satisfying, and I never completely bought hat Nathalie would have been dabbling in the sexual stuff she did. Not sure. . . . I thought Leah was a much better depicted character. But perhaps that was the intention; Nathalie was missing a core identity so anything she did seemed a put on.

The penguin US edition calls Felix "Fox" on the back cover. Seriously, doesn't anyone proofread things? I kept waiting for a character named Fox to show up, and thought the foxes were some allusion to that. Then I realized it was a typo.

http://lithub.com/in-praise-of-zadie-smiths-london/

Uninterested in her but this is a nice feature on ZS as someone to look up to.

there was a BBC adaptation of NW on tv a few weeks ago. Watchable but can't say I really enjoyed it.

Her new one, Swing Time, involving dance is getting the standard praise but I haven't read it.

finished swing time this morning and found it enjoyable but not overly engrossing. NW similarly didn't make much of an impression on me as i can recall almost nothing about it.

I'm enjoying Swing Time, but I still haven't read NW. A friend said that Swing Time is kinda her take on Elena Ferrante, which rings true in many ways.

I read NW and loved it, kind of a bummer to go back and see that ILB did not feel the same way. I wonder if people would feel differently now? I had zero expectations going in. It also helped that I recently read her most recent essay collection, so it was interesting to see the things that are verifiably 'her' distributed across different characters etc.

Also NW is actually much more Ferrante-ish in premise than Swing Time (looks like it came out in the same year as the first of the Neapolitan novels).

Has anyone been present at a performance of The Wife of Willesden or read the play and had thoughts they want to share?