![\"\"](\"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/NW2.jpg\" "\\"NW\\"")
<\/a>Published by Hamish Hamilton 27 August 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n304pp, hardcover, \u00a318.99<\/strong><\/p>\n Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018NW\u2019 is north-west London, specifically Willesden.\u00a0Zadie Smith\u2019s new novel follows four characters who grew up there on the same estate and went to the same school, a \u2018thousand-kid madhouse\u2019.\u00a0 Now in their mid-thirties, none have strayed very far geographically from the scenes of their childhood.\u00a0 But in terms of income, aspiration and social class, they have diverged immeasurably. \u00a0Perhaps predictably, the most \u2018successful\u2019 is also the unhappiest.<\/p>\n Three of the characters are given their own section, with prose style to reflect their several preoccupations and ways of thinking.\u00a0 We start with Leah, pale skinned and red haired, with a judgmental Irish mother, a useless philosophy degree, and a lovely French Algerian hairdresser husband who longs for a baby.\u00a0Leah\u2019s narrative mainly happens inside her head: \u2018At least with eyes closed there is something else to see.\u00a0 Viscous black specks.\u00a0 Darting waterboatmen, zigzagging.\u00a0 Zig.\u00a0 Zag.\u00a0Red river?\u00a0 Molten lake in hell?\u2019 The reader has to work quite hard to make sense of Leah\u2019s world from her fragmented observations, but the effort is largely rewarded, thanks to Zadie Smith\u2019s eye for the telling detail and exceptionally keen ear for word patterns and speech rhythms.<\/p>\n Leah is closer to the edge than anyone realizes.\u00a0 Her sense of identity seems entirely bound up in her possessive love for her husband, Michel.\u00a0 Leah\u2019s whiteness puts her in a minority both in the book and in this neighbourhood.\u00a0 She seems to want to allow herself to be absorbed into Michel\u2019s blackness.\u00a0 At work \u2013 she has an unfulfilling council job \u2013 her black co-workers show half-joking resentment of her marriage: \u2018No offence, but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it\u2019s a real issue.\u2019\u00a0 But when she takes Michel to dinner parties with her university-educated professional friends, his simplicity embarrasses her.<\/p>\n Michel is honest, Leah devious.\u00a0 She allows him to believe that she, too, wants a child, but she terminates her pregnancies in secret.\u00a0 (Why does she pay for an abortion? And why, later, does she steal contraceptive pills from her friend Natalie\u2019s bathroom cupboard?\u00a0 These things have been freely available for decades, few questions asked.\u00a0 This is a rare example of Zadie Smith slipping up on details.)\u00a0 Leah is trapped in a self-spun cocoon.\u00a0 Release of a kind comes when she is conned by a junkie she remembers from schooldays; the encounter and its aftermath propel her, painfully, out into the world.<\/p>\n The second story belongs to Felix, erstwhile drug dealer, son of a parasitic Rastaman.\u00a0 Felix has found true love for the first time with the beautiful and wholesome Grace (neither name is accidental), but he has one last journey to make, to lay the ghosts of his old life.\u00a0 This journey, through London at sticky Carnival time, from the Willesden estate to a car deal in Mayfair to Soho and the Hogarthian squalor of his trustafarian ex-lover\u2019s drug den, will be the last he will ever take.\u00a0 It has much in common with Mrs Dalloway<\/em>\u00a0and is the strongest, most fully realized section.\u00a0 Felix would have been a film director in another life, so his story unrolls like a film.\u00a0 It feels almost as if he is scripting his own fate.<\/p>\n The third section feels the least satisfactory.\u00a0 Keisha Blake, Leah\u2019s best friend since Keisha caught her by the red plaits and saved her from drowning at four years old, has come the furthest.\u00a0 She is a highly paid barrister; she has married a public schoolboy and changed her name to Natalie.\u00a0But the smart house and the business suits, the nanny and the two beautiful mixed-race children cannot give her a sense of purpose or coherence.\u00a0Furtively, on line, she discovers that \u2018on the website she was what everybody was looking for\u2019, and embarks on a sordid double life in an attempt to shore up her disintegrating personality.<\/p>\n To express this disintegration and detachment, Keisha\/Natalie\u2019s narrative is divided into no fewer than 185 short scenes.\u00a0 Some of these succeed, as when Natalie returns to the council flat of her childhood to offer unsought financial help to her sister Cheryl, who lives there with their mother and her own three babies.\u00a0As the sisters exchange sharp home truths over the body of a sleeping four-month-old, all the unresolved age-old tensions rise to the surface, painful and wholly believable; ‘ “But no one in here is looking for your help, Keisha!\u00a0 This is it!\u00a0 I ain\u2019t looking for you, end of!\u201d\u2019\u00a0 Too many scenes, however, are coy, whimsically oblique, or just dull.\u00a0 Scenes are told as emails, as quiz answers, as stage directions. Smith\u2019s experimentalism can be witty \u2013 she teases the reader with verbal puzzles.\u00a0 But sometimes it\u2019s just irritating, as when a whole lot of full stops pop up unbidden.\u00a0 \u2018Yes.\u00a0 Said Natalie Blake.\u00a0 Still smoking.\u00a0 PUT IT OUT.\u00a0 Shouted the old lady.\u2019\u00a0 Why?<\/p>\n The fourth character, Nathan Bogle, has no narrative of his own \u2013 he is dispossessed in most senses.\u00a0 An irresistible ten-year-old, a talented musician, a promising young footballer\u2026 now, Nathan\u2019s toes stick out of the holes in his trainers as he sells stolen Travelcards outside the tube.\u00a0 \u2018So sad\u2019 is how Leah\u2019s mother sums him up.\u00a0 An object of revulsion, fascination, fear, and a kind of dark desire, Nathan has a life that intertwines with those of the other three and pulls their stories together. NW<\/em> is about class, race, money, family, London, but above all it seeks to show how patterns laid down in childhood shape adult behaviour. Nathan Bogle is not so much a character as an externalization of the subconscious drives of the other three. His name is oddly similar to Natalie Blake\u2019s; in the end, is he her rescuer or her nemesis?\u00a0<\/p>\n NW<\/em> has its irritations and its longeurs, but it is subtle, thought-provoking and endlessly inventive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Reviewed by Charlotte Moore<\/p>\n \u2018NW\u2019 is north-west London, specifically Willesden. Zadie Smith\u2019s new novel follows four characters who grew up there on the same estate and went to the same school, a \u2018thousand-kid madhouse\u2019. Now in their mid-thirties, none have strayed very far geographically from the scenes of their childhood. But in terms of income, aspiration and social class, they have diverged immeasurably. Perhaps predictably, the most \u2018successful\u2019 is also the unhappiest.[…] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2795,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions\/2795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}