'NW': Four lives in a gritty London neighborhood

NW

By Zadie Smith

Penguin. 401 pp. $27

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Reviewed by Karen Heller

Still in her 30s, Zadie Smith is not merely one of Britain's finest younger writers with two terrific novels to her name, but also one of the English-speaking world's best chroniclers of race, class, and identity in urban confines.

Her first novel, White Teeth, written while Smith was still at Cambridge, dazzles. Her third book, On Beauty, inspired by E.M. Forster's Howard's End, won the females-only Orange Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. The Autograph Man, which appeared between, has been largely forgotten and forgiven, particularly in light of the treasure she produced mere years later.

And now Smith has produced NW, named for gritty Northwest London, specifically Willesden Green, the neighborhood where she was raised, an area going through the attendant friction of conflict and identity: crime, immigrants, gentrification. Smith's book, amazing in sections, overwrought and overthought in others, chronicles four neighborhood classmates from childhood through young adulthood. Its main focus is the long-term friendship of two very different girls. Leah is white, vulnerable, stubborn, and stuck in her choices. Keisha is black and driven, scaling Britain's rigid class system as she goes from council (that is, public) housing to university and becomes a barrister, changing her name to Natalie along the way.

Alas - I had such hopes for such a coruscating and ambitious writer - NW reads like a petri dish of literary lab experiments, one section's form and voice having little to do with the next. Leah is obsessed with the number 37. The novel's longest section, "Host" - there are plenty of religious references without the characters seeming particularly religious - is divided into short observational passages, some lyrical, some head-scratching, a numbing total of 185, divisible by 37. But "Host" is about Natalie, not Leah. Why 185? I haven't a clue.

In "Guest," we meet Felix, a reformed drug addict and son of a charming loser of a father, as he goes about one day in his messy life touring London, trying to mend matters, the end coming as such a shock, so dazzling in its execution, that it took my breath away, astonished by Smith's skill, the pyrotechnic way in which she can manipulate plot and voice.

Leah, the nice, duller girl who begins life with a slightly higher social status - these differences mattering in NW, mattering in Britain - but with markedly lower ambition, a woman who wants to do good, lover of dogs and lost causes, is stuck in a dead-end charity where all the women are miserably underpaid. Leah, however, has married a gorgeous, loving French-African hairdresser with sizable ambition who craves the life Natalie has obtained. Michel is all business while desperately aching for children. Leah, for reasons unclear, does not, and she secretly thwarts his hopes:

She did not know they had set off, nor in which direction the wind is blowing. She does not want to arrive. The truth is she had believed they would be naked in these sheets forever and nothing would come to them ever, nothing but satisfaction. Why must love "move forward"?

Natalie's story proves more complicated. She gathers all the plums as she climbs the ladder, going to a good university, marrying the prized upper-class academic star (half black/half Italian, with plenty of social graces, he never becomes quite present in these pages), producing babies and being good at it all. Here the two friends are at one of Natalie's dinner parties, a classic upper-class, farm-to-market, politically correct feast:

But Leah, someone is saying, but Leah, in the end, at the end of the day, don't you just want to give your individual child the very best opportunities you can give them individually? Pass the green beans with shaved almonds. Define best. Pass the lemon tart. Whatever brings a child the best possibility of success. Pass the berries. Define success.

Natalie has tried hard to become someone else, playing the part perfectly, but she pulls a late-stage, emotionally destructive turn, straight out of Buñuel, that may be one of the least believable character developments I've encountered in years. I mean, I wanted to throw the galley across the room. Because, honestly, this was the fall book many of us have been waiting to read.

Then again, Smith remains fearless, and there are moments - like Felix's odyssey - that astonish. American readers not fluent in London will struggle with some of the inside references, though not all. And I never fully believed Leah, in the way that I did Keisha/Natalie - until, that is, I stopped believing in her, too.

But what does work in NW is Smith's passion for her neighborhood, her chronicle of an urban community, perhaps forgotten by tourists and more affluent Londoners, but certainly not by her. The book is a rich if failed stew of choices, though her ambition and talent continue to awe.