Zadie Smith, The Fraud
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Zadie Smith is fed up. Her most recent novel, The Fraud, is about a famous criminal trial of a potential grand fraud and his obsessed followers, about the bombastic pettiness of the literary world (in 19th century London, but…), and also about the historical crimes and disasters that take place while we’re looking elsewhere, or that we’re seeing through our own layers of misinformation. In particular, she’d like us to actually face up to our tendency to place ourselves and our preferred stories about the world at the center of everything. She is, however, fed up in a particularly Zadie Smith way: insightful, nuanced, hilarious. She’s not just judging bad behavior, she’s curious about confusion and self-delusion. She wants to know everyone’s stories, and though she definitely has opinions, she understands how and why we get it so wrong. Which doesn’t stop her from being wicked funny about pretension, self-inflation, and the excuses we make for ourselves.
The novel mixes real people and events with imagined ones. The book’s first story revolves around Eliza Touchet, cousin, housekeeper, literary hostess, and editor for novelist William Ainsworth, a real figure, who is, in Smith’s novel, disconsolate at the attention and honors his frenemies have managed to grab (particularly Dickens, who he envies quite bitterly).
Her reimagining of the real people also has quite a bit of fiction in it, as she takes some huge, unnerving creative leaps. The novel’s been out long enough that many people may have read it, but in case you haven’t had the chance yet, to avoid giving away Smith’s many surprises, I’m going to leave it at that and focus on her maneuvering between the characters observing each other as she plays with the differences in their lives and perceptions.
By the time the novel begins, Eliza is also fairly fed up with waiting on and being expected to flatter William and his often drunken fellow authors as they hold forth. Also, it’s Eliza’s job to admire his novels, and it’s only getting harder:
Hilary St. Ives, 1869
No matter how briskly she tried to move through it, this new novel, Hilary St. Ives, proved disheartening. Old age had only condensed and intensified his flaws. People ejaculated, rejoined, cried out on every page. The many strands of the perplexing plot were resolved either by ‘Fate’, the fulfilment of a gypsy’s curse or a thunderstorm. It took over three hundred pages for young Hilary to work out that the servant who seemed unusually concerned with his future was his mother, and that the fellow who looked so very much like him that he could be his father was, indeed, his father. And for great swathes of the novel it was hard to distinguish it from the descriptions of a house agent:
No material change had been made in the mansion since its erection, and even the old furniture, chairs, beds, antique mirrors, and hangings were carefully preserved, so that it was not merely a capital specimen of Tudor architecture, but gave an accurate idea of the internal decorations of a large house of the period. The hall to which we have just adverted….
The Fraud is nakedly sharp-tongued, but Smith is committed to seeing everything through and from multiple voices and perspectives by giving us both the characters’ blind spots and their particular insights. In a Smith novel, no one is that character who doesn’t see or understand anything at all: even Howard Belsey in On Beauty or the badly behaved Victorian authors in The Fraud have their moments. Her characters are curious about each other, often unexpectedly compassionate, and also, less unexpectedly, often dense and clueless.
Outside, Looking In
The book starts with the arrival of a complete outsider, a boy we see through Eliza’s eyes at first, though she’s not even named: she’s an observer before she’s observed.
A Very Large Hole
A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually—but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who’d opened the door—easily amused, susceptible to beauty—found she couldn’t despise him.
“You’re from Tobin’s?”
“Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn’t it?”
The ceiling has fallen in (literally and also metaphorically, as we come to understand over the course of the book) from the sheer weight of books in the house’s second-floor library. We will never again see this boy who’s come to try to fix the mess, but Eliza observes him—his orange freckles, his “skinny, unstable legs like a marionette”—with more tender particularity than some writers give to their protagonists.
The book is full of revealing juxtapositions, both in the architecture of its construction and in the extreme differences of the characters, and we navigate many characters watching each other and trying to make sense of what they see. Next, the boy observes Eliza, an outsider’s limited view, with an omniscient narrator looking over his shoulder to comment briefly on what he does and does not understand:
He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn’t move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly.
And then Ainsworth and his King Charles spaniels come in to heartily interrupt, and Eliza takes the boy to see the damage. Still amazed by the harm books can wreak, he says,
“So many books. What’s he need with them all?”
“Mr. Ainsworth is a writer.”
“What—so he writ them all?”
“A surprising amount of them.”
The boy stepped forward to peer into the crater, as over the lip of a volcano. She joined him. These shelves had held histories three volumes deep: the kings, queens, clothes, foods, castles, plagues and wars of bygone days. But it was the Battle of Culloden that had pushed things over the edge. Anything referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie was now in the downstairs parlour, covered in plaster, or else caught in the embrace of the library’s Persian rug, which sagged through the hole in the floor, creating a huge, suspended, pendulous shape like an upturned hot air balloon.
Young as he is, she seems old to him. And in both the literal event that starts off the book, and in her point of view as she considers the wreckage, history has all collapsed together into this huge, suspended shape. We are ready, the book lets us know, for big changes. What we have had in the past is a disaster.
Andrew Bogle and the Claimant
Eliza and another central character eventually become obsessed with the criminal trial of a man at the center of a controversy about whether he is a lost heir of a wealthy family or a butcher perpetrating a great fraud, a controversy that has gripped London (based on real life). The book moves to another level when they go to see part of the trial in person. There we’re introduced to a key witness: Andrew Bogle, who was once enslaved in Jamaica, and whose story makes us see all the other stories differently. Characters who appear minor at first will later become major parts of the book, but when Eliza sees Bogle, who will be witnessing for “the Claimant,” she’s already paying attention, not only to his physical appearance (the description of how she sees him is deliberately painful in places for contemporary readers), but also to his dignity: “But a dignity hard won: a dignity in need of constant vigilance and protection.” He is very much in the shadow of the Claimant. And yet, the crowd at the trial already has faith in him:
Speak, Bogle! You know him! We believe you, Bogle!
Later, Eliza could never decide whether it was the influence of the crowd or some mysterious and mesmerizing aspect of Bogle himself that had worked upon her. She was up on her toes, straining for an unobstructed view. It seemed that never in her life had she been more curious to hear a man speak. Before anybody could do so, however, the son left the stage and swiftly returned with the main event: the Claimant himself. A giant! The chin-strap beard had receded many inches – to make room for the several extra stone gained since last photographed – and every button strained at the sheer girth of the man. A gasp went round the room. It took a moment for Eliza to understand that this was a noise of purest approval, even of awe. For all professed themselves glad indeed to see that Sir Roger had been “enjoying himself”, drinking it up and eating it up, by the looks of it, and generally living life to the full, as any man would, given the chance. And why not? He who was so hard done by, the victim of so many lies from so many unscrupulous scribblers and moralists, all of them desperately plotting to bring down this fun-loving, beer-swilling, aristocratic man of the people, Sir Roger. Fellow only wanted what was owed him, after all! And what was justice, if not that? Wild cheering ricocheted round the room. Cries of Bogle! And Tichborne! Thrown up alternately, like tolling bells. No change came over Bogle: he stayed in his seat. His face retained that impenetrable glaze – impenetrable because so much itself – with apparently nothing hidden or masked about it. It was a confoundment, like honesty itself.
This portrait of the Claimant feels both frisky and outraged. That “And why not?” implicitly criticizes the crowd and also shows how they can see the Claimant as a victim, as a “man of the people,” who should have restored to him what they believe has been unjustifiably taken away. A phenomenon we recognize in our lives but understand more deeply through literature. This makes me feel that, after all, despite everything, Zadie Smith is voting for the power of books. (And, God knows, we had better vote.)
There’s another huge shift in voice coming, so brilliantly done that for the first few months of noodling away at this MPP piece (I can be a very slow writer sometimes), I included multiple long passages to consider how Smith accomplishes her switch, how the narrator prepares the ground, how the book’s perspective changes). But she has set up the novel as a series of puzzle boxes, and when you reach the inner boxes, they should rightfully be a surprise. So instead, I want to say to you, dear friends and MPP readers, that it’s just an extraordinary novel, and let Smith herself tell you a bit about her approach to empathy and judgment:
Emily Bazelon: I can’t resist asking you an actual historical question. You tell us that Charles Dickens, the real novelist, the famous novelist, was on the wrong side of the 19th century debate about Jamaica, about the rebellion of enslaved people in Jamaica. So, what are we to make of this? How do you think about Dickens when you include this fact about him in all the other things that we think about him and his great empathy for all his characters?
Zadie Smith: This is so far out of the logic of present life at the moment, but I don’t think you have to make anything of it. I mean, you can make what you like of it, but the idea that what we make of someone fundamentally affects them? Charles Dickens is dead.
So, whatever you make of him, it’s about yourself. You have the choice to make your feelings one way or another. For me, it’s just a fact. It’s an added fact to all the other facts about him. And it’s completely in line with that part of him which dreaded chaos. He dreaded fuss, chaos, violence. He didn’t really want to think about the Colonies, particularly apart from in their kind of most American fabulous version. But at the same time, when he went to America and went south and saw Southern American slavery, he was absolutely horrified and said he wouldn’t read in any of those states. So, he is a man of contradictions.
I don’t know why it isn’t possible to hold more than one idea in our heads at the same time. And I can hold in my head the idea that Dickens is an extraordinary writer and also was completely wrong on the Jamaica question.
This novel is a story about stories, with shifts in perspective that make readers think about who we’re listening to and what we believe. A story of the 19th century and a story of our own times. And all this mixed with both a passion for and despair about literature, including the successful men (Ainsworth, Dickens, and some of their friends really come off very badly in this book). I don’t think you can walk away from it without having to dig more deeply, sometimes more uncomfortably, into central questions: Who waits on who and how? What do these men do with their power? Why might people root for frauds and liars and feel them as representatives of the people? And what aspects of history, crashing through the floor, are we unable to see or fully understand, even now?