Reading post: Zadie Smith in January

Zadie Smith: by David Shankbone, CC BY 4.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

So, January is over (or will be in a few hours) and it's time for a reading post. For my first author-focus of the year I chose the British writer Zadie Smith, who I'd never read before. Her books didn't sound like my thing: too busy, too loud, too sprawling. So why did I decide to read her this year? I think it was because of her latest book, The Fraud, which got good reviews. But, I thought, I shouldn't read her sixth novel if I've never read any of the others...

Then I read an essay by Smith in The New Yorker about when she was a mopey teenager and accidentally fell out of a window. I was amused -- I liked the authorial voice. I should read her, I thought to myself.

Further motivation came from one of our neighborhood little free libraries, where I found On Beauty, Smith's third novel. When I added that to a stack of books that I offered to my book club as possible next reads, they chose it. 

So, OK, let's do this. To start with, I checked out her first novel, White Teeth, from the George Reynolds branch library and her second novel, The Autograph Man, from the main library, and ordered her third book, a tiny collection of short stories called Martha & Hanwell, from Amazon.

1. White Teeth (2000). Smith won a contract for her first novel when she was an undergrad at Cambridge and it was a huge bestseller & critical success. The description of it never appealed to me, and when I started reading it, very quickly I thought, oh no. But after 438 pages I decided that it hadn't been a complete waste of time. It's the interlocking stories of two men who fought in World War II, Archie and Samad, their much younger wives, their three children (all born in 1975, the year Smith was also born -- Archie and his wife are based on Smith's parents), and various other friends and relations, all of whom live in North London. Many of the characters are either from Bangladesh or Jamaica (or descended from people from those places), with some white people thrown in, including Archie. There's a lot of talk about race, which is interesting to read from a British perspective. You can tell the author is very young, and I don't really enjoy reading family sagas by very young people -- but writers have to start somewhere, and this was an impressive debut, despite it not being quite to my taste.
   
   
2. The Autograph Man (2002). Like most second novels, this one isn't as good as the first, and since I didn't love Smith's first novel... It was an interesting concept: her main character, Alex-Li Tandem, is half Chinese, half Jewish, and I think many of the other characters are also Jewish, some being Black and Jewish. I say "I think" because I gave up on the book after about 60 pages. It seemed as though it was written by an even younger person than the one who wrote White Teeth. I found an article about how to read Zadie Smith that said "Most people pretend The Autograph Man never happened, and you probably should too." So I said fine, and dropped it.
   
   
3. Martha & Hanwell (2005). This itty-bitty volume contains two short stories (written in 2003 and 2004). I liked them pretty well, although they still struck me as the product of a young mind trying to reach beyond its knowledge. But they were OK, even moving.
   

After I finished (or gave up on) the first three books, I considered ending this month's challenge, but I still needed to read On Beauty, for the book group (we're not meeting until early February). So I thought, OK, I'll give her another chance. I also got Changing My Mind (a book of essays) and NW (her fourth novel), from the main library, and settled in for another round of Zadie Smith.

4. On Beauty (also 2005). For the first few days of reading this book I didn't think I was going to make it. I don't have to read it, I thought, but of course it was the book for the book group, so... I didn't like the characters, I didn't care about their situations (academics are so boring), I'd never read Howards End, which the book is an homage to. But then at some point I started to turn around. The characters got more interesting, rounder. I started wishing I could see pictures of them, especially Kiki, the mom, even though I could see her in my head. I read the last 150 pages in one day, and while I was ready for the book to end, I won't forget the characters right away. It is an interesting book, and in it, Smith really starts to sound like a grown-up (she was 30 when the book was published).
   
   
   4a. Howards End by E. M. Forster (1910). Yeah, I figured I owed it to Forster to read On Beauty's inspiration. The only Forster I'd read before this was A Passage to India, which I didn't love, but I definitely enjoyed this. It's very readable. And of course I kept thinking about On Beauty as I read it -- oh, that's where that idea came from, huh, so they go to hear Beethoven in this book and Mozart in Zadie Smith's version, and on and on. My only problem with the book was that I didn't fully understand it. Forster is talking a lot about class, and I just didn't get the distinctions he was making. Maybe it's a British thing, or also a 1910 thing. It got worse toward the end, or maybe I should say more important. It was odd to be reading sentence after sentence that made no sense to me. Still, I'm glad I read it. I might get the movie from the library and see if that helps me understand.
   
   Post note: I did watch the movie and I believe I understood it, but whether that means I now understand the book more... I don't know. The movie made it almost seem as though the ghost of Mrs. Wilcox was driving the plot inexorably toward Margaret acquiring Howards End, as she was supposed to. Also there seemed to be a lot about how good intentions go awry and how hard it is to "help" anyone. I still didn't understand what Margaret sees in Mr. Wilcox, but maybe that's a problem with the original book. Anyway, good movie, very enjoyable. Thank you, Zadie Smith, for making me read Howards End and see the movie.
   
   
   
5. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009). While I was struggling with On Beauty, I started reading the essays in this volume between chapters. I didn't like many of them -- so much of the time I felt as though Smith was showing off. I'd like her better if she'd calm down a little, not constantly showcase her erudition. But I was interested in her essays on Kafka and Nabokov, and two essays about her family were very moving.
   
   The last essay, and the longest, is about David Foster Wallace... She mentions that DFW "was my favorite living writer" -- and right there, I thought, is a good explanation of why I'm having trouble reading Zadie Smith. DFW doesn't interest me. It might be because, as a depressed person myself, I don't have a lot of interest in the ruminations of another depressed person (though I was amused by his story "The Depressed Person," but that's supposedly not about him, it's about the woman who wrote Prozac Nation). For most of her essay Smith talks about DFW's ideas as if he's a rational person, and only at the very end does she admit that, since he killed himself while she was writing the essay, maybe her view that his longing for "the infinite" was "purely philosophical," was "wishful thinking on my part." I'll say. Well, anyway, I managed to finish her book.
   
   
6. NW (2012). I took a break before reading this, because I was kind of Smithed out, but I did want to read NW, since it's supposed to be her best novel. I definitely liked it better than her other books, although the long section about the character of Keisha/Natalie got tedious and Smithy. I liked the Leah section and the Felix section, and the last two short sections were good. As one reviewer said, Smith takes a big step forward with this book. It's experimental, in a good way. If I were going to do this month over, I'd read NW and On Beauty and leave it at that.

Oof. That was a difficult month. Not a nice thing to do to myself in January. But I got to experience Zadie Smith and I learned that, in fact, she's not my type (as I suspected) and I may not read anything else by her. I'll see. I might eventually try to read The Fraud.

I also learned something about this year's challenge and it is this: do not try to read more than 3 books by the author of the month. If I like the author, I can read more by them LATER. Reading too much by one author can make you nauseated. Maybe that's not true if you fall madly in love with them, but that doesn't happen often. I am going to enforce this rule strictly from here on out.

Since it was January I also read one book from the piles by my bed (Mixed Company, a book of short stories by Jenny Shank -- I got it from a little free library and was not expecting to like it, but I did like it, a lot) and I started but did not finish a gigantic presidential biography (it will be my companion throughout February). And a few other things, but mostly it was a hard reading month.

In February I've chosen a very different writer to focus on: J. M. Coetzee, the Nobel Prize-winning South African writer (I think he lives in Australia now, though). Coetzee was born in 1940, so he is the same age as my oldest cousin. He has written roughly 18 novels, but I am only going to read #1, #3, and #4. I already have them all, sitting on my nightstand. Fortunately, they are all short. I also get to read two Barbara Pyms, my usual February indulgence, and I'll keep chipping away at that biography.