Book 68 - Zadie Smith "NW"
Oct. 6th, 2024 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzy_daveZadie Smith "NW" (Hamish Hamilton)
I think this book is Zadie Smith's way of dealing with mortality, which is to say it's a very erudite, emotionally complex, formally inventive take on the issue.
The book is split between different perspectives, each with its own formal conceits and tone. The fun is the interplay between these, the way time compresses and overlaps, and choices have consequences that radiate outward jaggedly. This isn't your magnolia/love actually/slacker characters cross paths and fates diverge and mingle thing--it goes deeper. It's not even a pulp fiction/imitations of pulp fiction non linear interlocking deal where the story emerges bit by bit across many crossing timelines. It's more of a high modernist Faulknerian thing, where subjective experience is recreated in prose, and perspective is fluid and time compresses and expands, except here the subject is time itself and persons across time. Did I mention time? What I'm trying to say is weird shit happens with time in this book.
Oh yeah and the characters are extremely well drawn and there's a whole lot of class and race politics in the fold and marriage and motherhood and technology find themselves under the microscope.
The Natalie section is one of the best things I've ever read. Her section forms the structural and emotional core of the book. Her search for a constant identity and the slow erosion of the person she once was is devastating to witness. Her tale is told in vignettes that act like guideposts along the timeline of her life, sometimes narrowing in and viewing a single incident from 3 to 4 perspectives, sometimes covering years in a single stroke. All of the pathos of the Nathan section that immediately follows was built in Natalie's journey. He doesn't get a chapter, and his chastisement of Natalie is one of the best 11th hour character reveals I've read.
This is the work of someone who has lost the faith. The voice is far from the certainty of White Teeth. It has more of the ambivalence and empathy of her nonfiction, without the occasional both-sides fallacies.
Reminds me of Light in August and In Our Time. Oh and I caught a Joyce reference, most likely from Ulysses.
Anyway, the more I read, the more I liked it. This is a novelist at the height of her powers. Definitely has me hooked for at least one more novel.
I think this book is Zadie Smith's way of dealing with mortality, which is to say it's a very erudite, emotionally complex, formally inventive take on the issue.
The book is split between different perspectives, each with its own formal conceits and tone. The fun is the interplay between these, the way time compresses and overlaps, and choices have consequences that radiate outward jaggedly. This isn't your magnolia/love actually/slacker characters cross paths and fates diverge and mingle thing--it goes deeper. It's not even a pulp fiction/imitations of pulp fiction non linear interlocking deal where the story emerges bit by bit across many crossing timelines. It's more of a high modernist Faulknerian thing, where subjective experience is recreated in prose, and perspective is fluid and time compresses and expands, except here the subject is time itself and persons across time. Did I mention time? What I'm trying to say is weird shit happens with time in this book.
Oh yeah and the characters are extremely well drawn and there's a whole lot of class and race politics in the fold and marriage and motherhood and technology find themselves under the microscope.
The Natalie section is one of the best things I've ever read. Her section forms the structural and emotional core of the book. Her search for a constant identity and the slow erosion of the person she once was is devastating to witness. Her tale is told in vignettes that act like guideposts along the timeline of her life, sometimes narrowing in and viewing a single incident from 3 to 4 perspectives, sometimes covering years in a single stroke. All of the pathos of the Nathan section that immediately follows was built in Natalie's journey. He doesn't get a chapter, and his chastisement of Natalie is one of the best 11th hour character reveals I've read.
This is the work of someone who has lost the faith. The voice is far from the certainty of White Teeth. It has more of the ambivalence and empathy of her nonfiction, without the occasional both-sides fallacies.
Reminds me of Light in August and In Our Time. Oh and I caught a Joyce reference, most likely from Ulysses.
Anyway, the more I read, the more I liked it. This is a novelist at the height of her powers. Definitely has me hooked for at least one more novel.
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