Review by New York Times Review
ZADIE SMITH'S latest novel, "NW," introduces four characters: Leah, Felix, Keisha (renamed Natalie) and Nathan, all of whom grew up in the same impoverished part of northwest London. The postal code for the area is the NW of the title, and Caldwell - the housing project where the characters were raised - is the only fictional place on a very real map. The project consists of five tower blocks, each named for a giant of English philosophy: Smith, Hobbes, Bentham, Locke, Russell. Given the grimness of the locale, the names are only slightly less amusing than the titles of real tower blocks in Kilburn, which are named for Austen, Dickens and Fielding. There are times when the ironies of fiction cannot match those that reality provides. Smith's novels are notable not just for their social acuity, but also for their ability to absorb philosophical ideas. Her last, "On Beauty," managed to be interesting about aesthetics as well as about race and compassion, and the prose was well turned and sweet-natured to match. The themes in "NW" are more radical and the language more fractured. Though it remains absolutely rooted, stuck to the map, contexts change and narrative styles shift This is a book in which you never know how things will come together or what will happen next. The first section of the novel is Leah's. She describes herself as the only white woman on the local council's lottery fund distribution team, but even her whiteness is the result of two potentially clashing cultures: Irish and English. And cultures are clashing all around her - her husband is half Algerian, half Guadeloupean; her best friend is first-generation Caribbean; and her friend's husband is the product of a park encounter between a rich Italian woman and a man from Trinidad. There is no easy sense of ethnicity available to these characters. "Of course," one says, struggling to understand a binary view of the British class system, "I'm already divided in half." Leah likes her husband, loves her dog and hates her best friend, Natalie, a lawyer who has done better than almost anyone from Caldwell. Leah's life is proceeding "pretty much as it should, and her husband thinks it is time she had a child, but Leah is not convinced. Although women's bodies are the keepers of an organic kind of time, Leah finds herself refusing it: stuck, caught in love's eternal moment, or in her need to stay forever 18. Time is a problem for Leah, who constantly notices how it moves for other people. It is compressed by old age, congealed or stretched by smoking hash; it is "uncanny." Leah watches a young girl making a daisy chain as though there were some mystery to the whole business of sequence or consequence: "Split a stem with a thumbnail, thread the next daisy through." The language here reflects this modernist anxiety about one thing following another, about the ticking of the clock and the way time leads us toward death. Sentences are short; they fail to add meaning or make connections: "This too will pass. Four forty-five. Zig, zag. Tick. Tock. Sometimes bitterness makes a grab for Leah." Dialogue starts mid-flow, and is cut off before the speaker is done. The physical world is also unreliable and prone to fragment. A plastic pen splinters in Leah's mouth, a phone booth has "thick shattered glass, cuboid shards, all around." Leah is attracted to a young woman who cheats her out of £30, and before long she finds herself almost mixed up with her. It is as though she cannot find the edges of herself. Her sexuality is fluid, and she is porous to spiritual experience. Sitting on the bus she stares at an Indian woman's bindi until she finds she "has entered the dot, passing through it, emerging into a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear." After Leah, "NW" follows Felix Cooper through a relaxed day, and the prose shifts, fittingly, to an easygoing, intelligent naturalism. The past makes sense of the present. When Felix looks at a photograph from his childhood in a communal squat: "Garvey House spilled out into the concrete backyard. Kids barefoot, parents looking like kids themselves. Afros, headscarfs, cain rows, weird stiff wigs, a tall skinny, spiritual looking Rasta resting on a big stick." On this particular day, Felix wakes in his girlfriend's bed, visits his father in Caldwell, talks to a decent, left-wing neighbor and travels into central London to look at a decrepit vintage car he might refurbish. He goes to the pub with the seller, an adman who looks on Felix as a dumb, receptive piece of the market. After the pub, he drops in on an old girlfriend, a bono aristocrat who has been two years clean, except, as Felix points out, for "the coke, weed, drink, pills." There is something genuinely nice and a bit sad about Felix, whose father is so louche and whose mother absconded when he was a boy. By the time he leaves his ex's flat we understand, a little, what it is like to be him, moving through the world, and we like him a lot - the writer has made us like him. She gives us no warning of what comes next: his very ordinary and difficult fate. THE largest part of "NW" belongs to Keisha, Leah's best friend, who renames herself Natalie before she qualifies as a barrister. Her tale consists of short numbered sections, 185 in all, starting with the time when, at the age of 4, she saved Leah from drowning by pulling her red pigtails up out of the pool. We follow the pair through school at Brayton Comprehensive - she studies, Leah takes Ecstasy - and into the amazing world offered by admission into university. Keisha comes from a churchgoing family: her friendship with Leah is discouraged and her adolescent fervor shifted onto a dogged, religious boyfriend who accompanies her to college, where they study law and have drab sex. Keisha then meets the beautiful man who will become her husband, changes her name and starts to work her way up. Her progress in the legal profession is grinding and difficult, and this is echoed by the fragmented narrative here, the refusal of these staccato passages to link up. Natalie works among people who do not welcome her, or even see her properly. When she has children they bring no sense of authenticity or transcendence, but she does welcome the extra work, because work is what she understands. As her life becomes more and more hollowed out, Natalie begins to hook up with strangers she meets online, and when her marriage starts to crack, she ends up wandering the streets with Nathan, a shady classmate from Brayton. It is the weekend of Carnival, and the accounts of all four characters collide. Smith's previous novels have been exuberantly plotted, and were resolved in a highly "novelistic" way. This book is much more tentative and touching in its conclusions. In an essay called "Two Paths for die Novel," Smith has challenged what she calls the unexamined credos upon which realism is built: "the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self." None of these things make sense on the streets of northwest London. "NW" represents a deliberate undoing; an unpacking of Smith's abundant narrative gifts to find a deeper truth, audacious and painful as that truth may be. The result is that rare thing, a book that is radical and passionate and real. As her life becomes more hollowed out, one character begins to hook up with strangers she meets online. Anne Enright's novel "The Gathering" won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. She is the author, most recently, of the memoir "Making Babies" and the novel "The Forgotten Waltz."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 23, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In her first novel since On Beauty (2005), Smith draws on her deepening social and psychological acuity and her intimacy with North West London to portray a quartet of struggling men and women linked by blood, place, affinity, and chance. Of Jamaican descent, Keisha, who renames herself Natalie, is smart, disciplined, ambitious, and duplicitous. Anglo Leah is unconventional, fearful, compassionate, and devious. They were close growing up together in public housing but are now leading somewhat divergent lives. Natalie is a corporate lawyer with a wealthy husband, two children, and a big, flashy house. Leah works for a not-for-profit organization and is married to a sweet French African hairdresser. As girls, they had crushes on schoolmate Nathan; now he's mired in drugs, violence, and rage. Noble and ambitious biracial Felix crosses their paths just as his radiant integrity and kindness become liabilities. With exceptional discernment, wit, empathy, and artistry, Smith creates a breathtakingly intricate mesh of audible and interior voices while parsing family relationships, class and racial divides, marriage, and friendship. In this quintessential twenty-first-century urban novel depicting a vibrant, volatile multicultural world, Smith calibrates the gravitational forces of need and desire, brutality and succor, randomness and design, dissonance and harmony, and illuminates both heartbreaking and affirming truths about the paradoxes of human complexity.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The reader first meets Leah Hanwell at her most vulnerable (some might say gullible): at home, when the doorbell rings and in tumbles a desperate, unknown but not unfamiliar woman, pleading for money, which Leah provides. Although this incident soon fades into an awkward anecdote shared later at awkward gatherings, it introduces the framework of Smith's (White Teeth) excellent and captivating new novel, in which the lines dividing neighbors from strangers are not always clear or permanent. The book takes place in NW London, where characters intersect and circumvent one another's lives and, in the process, expose their ethnic distinctions and class transformations, their relationships and their secrets. Leah's childhood best friend Natalie Blake (formerly Keisha Blake) eventually becomes the primary focus and the contrast between the two women allows for some of the book's most compelling insights, namely the inevitability of vs. the disinterest in becoming a mother, which Natalie has done and Leah decisively has not. The book's middle section introduces Felix Cooper, a friend of neither woman, but whose fate will affect them both. Smith's masterful ability to suspend all these bits and parts in the amber which is London refracts light, history, and the humane beauty of seeing everything at once. Agent: Georgia Garrett, Rogers, Coleridge and White. (Sept. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Partway through this charged onslaught of a novel, Smith's first in the seven years since On Beauty, a young tough refusing to put out a cigarette on a children's playground says, "You can't really chat to me. I'm Hackney, so," referring to the London borough. Although it gets a rise from his challenger, the comment clarifies Smith's story. Geography is destiny, and NW (North West London), with its housing projects and increasingly marginalized community, is the force shaping the narrative. Natalie Blake (nee Keisha) grew up there but has worked hard, tugged at her Afro-Caribbean roots, and become a lawyer; friend Leah, who also got a degree (as a state-school wild card) and is now "the only white girl on [Council's] Fund Distribution Team," doesn't want to move on. They circle warily, and Natalie eventually circles back, even as other characters-ambitious Felix and heartthrob Nathan, now in the gutter-wash through the you-are-there writing. VERDICT Told in numbered, run-on chapters that occasionally offer an aphorism or poetry, Smith's elliptical prose initially frustrates, then mesmerizes; it's a brilliant, daring way to deliver real lives-and, in the end, an emotional knockout. [See Prepub Alert, 3/5/12.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A wildly ambitious jigsaw puzzle of a novel, one that shuffles pieces of chronology, identity, ethnicity and tone, undermining cohesion and narrative momentum as it attempts to encompass a London neighborhood that is both fixed and fluid. Many of Smith's strengths as a writer are journalistic--a keen eye for significant detail, ear for speech inflections, appreciation for cultural signifiers and distinctions--as she demonstrated in her previous collection (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, 2009). Yet, she first earned renown as a novelist with her breakthrough debut (White Teeth, 2000), and her fourth novel (first in six years) finds her challenging herself and the reader like never before. The title refers to "North West London, a dinky part of it you've never heard of called Willesden, and...you'd be wrong to dismiss it actually because actually it's very interesting, very diverse.' Lord, what a word." What initially seems to be a comedy of manners, involving two women who have been lifelong friends but now feel a distance in the disparity of their social standing (the one raised poorer by a Caribbean mother has done far better than the middle-class Caucasian), ultimately turns darker with abortion, murder, drug addiction and the possibility of a suicide. Much of the drama pivots on chance encounters (or fate?), making the plot difficult to summarize and even a protagonist hard to pinpoint. Each of the book's parts also has a very different structure, ranging from very short chapters to an extended narrative interlude to numbered sections that might be as short as a paragraph or a page. The pivotal figure in the novel goes by two different names and has no fixed identity (other than her professional achievement as a barrister), and she doesn't begin to tell the back story that dominates the novel's second half until the first half concludes (it highlights different characters). "At some point we became aware of being modern,' of changing fast," interjects the author, who has written a novel so modern that nothing flows or fits together in the conventional sense, but whose voice remains so engaging and insights so incisive that fans will persevere to make of it what they will. Smith takes big risks here, but some might need to read this twice before all the pieces fit together, and more conventionally minded readers might abandon it in frustration.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
