Ever since “White Teeth,” her dazzling debut in 2000, Zadie Smith has labored under an enviable weight of critical and popular expectations. Her second novel, “The Autograph Man,” was criticized in some quarters for not leaping even higher, but “On Beauty” won the Orange Prize in 2006. The only new literary term in recent memory to gain any currency — “hysterical realism” — was coined in James Wood’s review of her nascent body of work. Even now that she’s seated in the pantheon of modern novelists, I have things in my freezer older than she is.
And here she comes with a big, challenging new novel about the forces that poison our dreams of economic ascendancy. The title is the only thing abbreviated about “NW.” Everything else is luxuriously spun out, pulled and examined from various angles by an author who, like London, seems to have a camera on every street corner. This is what many of us were hoping for but didn’t get this summer from John Lanchester’s “Capital,” another X-ray view of contemporary London. While Lanchester focused on a pricey street in the southwest Clapham neighborhood, Smith’s characters live a world away in the northwest part of the city, where she grew up during the ’70s and ’80s. In the blunted lives of several young adults, she captures the harrowing plight of a new generation of lost souls.
Smith has said her composition of “NW” was influenced by Virginia Woolf, whose ghost you can sense in this fluid mingling of internal thoughts and dialogue, snatches of description and sudden shifts in point of view. Jennifer Egan’s protean “A Visit From the Goon Squad”has also helped prepare an audience for Smith’s new novel: Each of the four sections of “NW” demonstrates a different form. There’s no second-person narrator or anything as weird as a PowerPoint presentation, but the longest part of “NW” is divided into 185 short, numbered sections, ranging from straightforward narrative to menu items, quiz answers, IM chats and even stage directions. I sympathize if you have no patience for this sort of experimentation, which can seem so graspingly avant-garde, but Smith uses the swirl of these disparate elements to illustrate the complexity of modern life. If “NW” is difficult to enter, it’s no more difficult than moving into any new neighborhood: At first, you can’t imagine you’ll ever learn your way around the winding streets, but soon this strange habitat feels like home.
The story opens with an uncomfortable, apparently random encounter on a summer afternoon. Leah Hanwell answers the door and discovers a desperate young woman, pleading, crying: Someone has been taken to the hospital, and she has no money for a cab to follow the ambulance. Can Leah help?
All of us who live in cities, who daily risk bumping into beggars with their smelly clothes and incurable needs, have our studied methods to avoid such confrontations: the brisk walk, the straight-ahead stare, the bound volumes of Ayn Rand, our cleverly edited memory of whatever religious tradition we were raised in. But this repellent woman is right there in Leah’s house, in her face: “I live here,” she screams. “I live just here,” not far from Leah’s flat.
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