NW by Zadie Smith

Previously published in The Herald Magazine. 

Almost exactly half way through NW, Zadie Smith breaks narrative form she has been using to continue telling her story in a series of vignettes. There are 185 of them and they are the most arresting part of this novel, forcing the reader to put together pieces of an imperfect but incredibly contemporary puzzle about adulthood and strange encounters. 

NW is named for London’s North West, where the book is set in and around a council estate where part-Irish Leah and first generation Caribbean Keisha grow up, first best friends and then co-conspirators in the battle of the teenager years. Leah coasts along but ends up not much better off than she started, living her adult life in a council flat nearby the old estate, stuck in a low paying dead end job and married to a hairdresser. Keisha strives fiercely for better and finds herself slowly inching upwards, changes her name to Natalie, becomes a successful lawyer, marries rich and moves into the gentrified part of the area with her children and her husband with whom she is the ‘double act that only speaks to each other when they are on stage’. NW is the story of their lives, and of the lives of two men who grew up in the same area and fared far worse than either of these two women. 

NW is ripe with London - or any big immigrant filled city really, as Smith describes the area as ‘disappointed city living for those tired of their countries’. There is class struggle, race struggle, economic struggle, even a strange, uncomfortable reproductive struggle, with Leah secretly taking contraceptives while her husband pines for a child. Both Lea and Natalie are caught within themselves constantly, unable to settle, each bereft in her own way. Both are teetering on the edge of pretense, having to play a part they don’t fit into. Leah flounders, admitted ‘I just don’t understand why I have this life’, but Natalie in her sink or swim way pushes onwards, thinking ‘Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic’. NW examines what it is like to form a life in a city that often has a life of its own, or may even have a life picked out for its inhabitants. 

Zadie Smith has a been a literary force since she published White Teeth at 25 and she’s continued to evoke varying (sometimes extreme) responses for her work since then. NW is far from White Teeth - all that hysterical realism James Woods has accused Smith and her contemporaries of isn’t really present in NW. All those details are internalised  by the characters - by Smith, even. There are some wonderful turns of phrases here, some great metaphors in the writing that are at times echoed by the changes in narrative form. The book includes more than vignettes - there is a menu, a string of chat messages, map directions, even a there’s even a poem about an apple tree with the text formatted in the pattern of a tree ‘Under which nice girls make mistakes’.

Of course, from that arises the question is there an actual plot in the strictest sense? Pshaw. When did great literary talents need a plot to write a book?