Book Review: 'NW' by Zadie Smith

This week’s blog post is brought to you in association with the marvellous people of the Penguin UK Proof Group.

Set in North West London, (postcode NW, naturally) Smith's new novel explores the lives of four thirty-somethings emerging from the estate where they were born.

Given Zadie Smith’s writerly pedigree - for those not familiar with her, she is a critically acclaimed author and recipient of several awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award for 'On Beauty' in 2006 - it is not surprising to see that NW has been receiving a great deal of critical attention. And opinion seems strongly divided over whether Smith's experimentation with form in NW has produced a mess or a masterpiece.

I personally suspect that the novel's detractors have never experienced the environment the author brings so vividly to life, or have never struggled with their identities whilst trying to escape the social limitations of their upbringing. My initial reaction the NW's opening pages was one of recognition.

My second response to NW, after a Summer of light-weight holiday reading (and some of the not-so-light-weight ‘A Song of Ice and Fire books'), was that I had suddenly arrived back at university on my English Literature degree.

The abrupt, fractured prose style of the opening pages, representing a character, Leah's, stream of consciousness, brought me back to my undergraduate time spent reading Joyce’s Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. It struck me how effective a formal tool this style of writing is for communicating the realities of life in a busy urban environment.

Smith's experimentation with form, however, is far from flawless, and NW lacks some of the impact of her earlier novels. This fact is not enough to eclipse the novel's strengths though, for instance the attention she pays to Felix, a character we are introduced to all too briefly, which gives us something truly worth reading for.

An ear for dialogue means that Smith, when she is on top form, creates deep, intriguing characters who communicate in a way that sounds real to the mind's ear. Felix is one such character.

Leah and Nathalie, a third character, with whom Leah shares the majority of the word count, read less fluidly, but, to me, come to represent life in London in our contemporary moment. Brief encounters with an endless sea of strangers, and the need to make connections and make sense of the constant stream of information modern technology bombards us with makes for a disjointed experience. NW, whether intentionally or not, seems to reflect this fractured mode of living.

The conclusion I came to about Smith's latest novel is that, though it is not her greatest work, it is very timely. I'd recommend you give it a try, bearing in mind that you may find the experience as jarring as a tube journey in the rush hour. Stick with it. The moments where NW shines are points of clarity, like pausing in the bustling crowd to take a deep breath.

NW is a flawed but very worthwhile read.

The Jump Artist

Last week, Penguin Books UK very kindly sent me a copy of Austin Ratner’s The Jump Artist to review. Consequently I spent several (unusually) pleasant tube journeys and a sunny afternoon working my way through it.

---- SPOILERS AHEAD----

The Jump Artist is a fictional reworking of the life story of photographer Philippe Halsman, a photographer who’s work you might be familiar with even if you don’t know his name. It is Halsman’s later body of work that provides the strange name of the novel - it stems from his assertion that by photographing people when they jumped he was able to capture something more essential about them - an element of their soul.

Ratner justifies his project by describing it as ‘...an artistic tribute... more like a painting or a sculpture [than a biography].’ Rather than relating history, he takes Philippe Halsman and turns the photographer into a literary character. This move is potentially risky for a careless author, but in this instance I think such a strategy works because Ratner contextualises his creation with accurate historical fact, preventing the novel from becoming too fanciful.

Halsman becomes the medium through which we observe a portrait of Europe during the rise of fascism, the outbreak of the Second World War and the creeping ugliness of anti-Semitism. The way in which Ratner deals with this incredibly serious, and frequently explored, bit of history is subtle but fascinating. The psychologised Halsman doesn’t focus constantly on his identity as an individual of Jewish descent, instead he is introverted and centred on punishing himself for a lack of self control, and exploring his emotional state. He reacts rather than acts, and the novel reflects this, for instance, in the first part of the book concerning the trial, where the event is narrated by Halsman’s inner monologue, rather than manifesting as a dramatised version of a court appearance.

The attitudes of the people around him, and the rise of the Nazi Party, however, force Halsman to react in a physical way to his surroundings through an exodus first to Paris and then to the US. In the real world this final move provided the photographer with his big opportunity and made him into a great American success story, which Ratner downplays by maintaining Halsman’s quiet train of thought and constant haunting by a sense of misplaced guilt.

It seems ironic that [the character] Halsman reveals so little of his interior monologue as the trajectory of the novel leads to his photographic identity as ‘The Jump Artist’. Ratner’s creation seems to be very reluctant to be as open with people as he expects them to be with his camera. Susan Sontag in her hugely influential work On Photography suggests that photography can be understood as a process of people trying to verify and refine their real-world experiences. I think it would be possible to argue, in the light of her work, that Ratner’s Halsman seeks to establish his identity, his place in the world, through photography. The production of images implies the production of a series of fixed, unchanging points in time, in contrast to Halsman’s thought pattern, which is always in a state of drift. Photographs might appeal to the literary Halsman as a form of certainty or stability.

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Conclusion:

The blending of the factual with Halsman’s fictionalised interiority creates a slow, dream-like pace for the novel. I found myself drawn into the character that Ratner has created, but I suspect the slow glide of the prose won’t be for everyone.

The Jump Artist is well worth a read (unless you thrive on fast-faced novels, in which case give it a miss), and is especially suitable for readers who enjoy work like W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.

I would like to thank Penguin Books UK for sending it to me, because I don’t know if I would have picked it up of my own accord. Give the opportunity to read it, however, I enjoyed it a lot and would suggest you pre-order yourself a copy!

All the best,

Alison