Reading NW

Scattered thoughts on Zadie Smith's NW:

1. NW was my last book of 2012 and also my first of 2013, because I made the mistake of starting it while riding the December tilt-a-whirl of exam marking and holiday preparation--but I couldn't wait. My reading, therefore, was as fragmented as the book itself. This did not matter. Even after days or weeks away from the story, re-entry was effortless. The principal characters--two women and two men in NW London working out how to live in this world--stick with you.

2. Upon finishing, I immediately began re-reading.

3. I tried to avoid reviews. There was a lot of noise about this book, and I wanted an unmediated experience--which really isn't possible when you've read Smith's other novels and the essays collected in Changing my Mind. (Read the essays! Especially, "Speaking in Tongues," which addresses the burdens of the multi-voiced, with a close look at then-newly elected Barack Obama and themes that Smith returns to in the NW character of Keisha/Natalie.) 

4. There's much to hate about Zadie Smith: brilliant, bestselling, beautiful. And, chances are, younger than you, dear reader. But it's impossible to hate someone so hilarious.

5. Why two covers? Is one of them the British or US edition? My copy has the plain cover, but both are for sale in Canadian bookstores.  

6. Notwithstanding #3, I stumbled across a couple articles online, luckily after I finished the book for the first time. Darin Strauss, in a review published in The New York Times last month, "Reasons to Re-Joyce" [ugh, that title!--otherwise great] called NW a masterpiece directly descended from Joyce. He defended Smith against criticisms that the work was difficult and gimmicky. A few months earlier, Lisa Moore had given NW a glowing review in The Globe and Mail, citing Smith's "bionic hearing" for conversations that happen in an urban zone crammed with immigrants "from everywhere" and their more settled children. Oddly, in praising Smith's ability to render social fault lines in a few spare strokes, both Moore and Strauss quote the same short passage from a dinner party scene, so here it is:

Pass the heirloom tomato salad. The thing about Islam. Let me tell you about Islam. Everyone is suddenly an expert on Islam. But what do you think, Samhita, yeah what do you think, Samhita, what’s your take on this? Samhita, the copyright lawyer. Pass the tuna.

7. Each time I savored those lines, my mind jumped to Lorrie Moore's jumbled dinner party dialogue (many pages lengthier, but a similar disembodied technique) in her 2009 novel, A Gate at the Stairs. Also brilliant and heartbreaking.

8. Sure, the book is full of unconventional syntax and punctuation, but so what? It didn't seem particularly daring, just utterly vivid and compelling. Anyone who says it's difficult isn't paying much attention.

9. The ending left me with questions, a few reservations. It's not that I want the plot tied up neatly, but after establishing the fractured/competing identities of the women so convincingly, the resolutions, or hints of resolutions to come, seemed glib. And what are we to make of the enthusiastic ratting out of Nathan? Is it meant as a shared indulgence to cement renewed closeness between the women and distract them from their (very real) problems, or a comment on life's winners and losers and the ever-shifting alliances in a place like NW? Or have I misread that completely? 

10. NW is a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The list was announced earlier this week.
 
11. I just discovered this audio clip from Toronto's International Festival of Authors this past October: the CBC's Eleanor Wachtel interviews Smith about NW.