There is a scene in the BBC’s adaptation of Zadie Smith’s acclaimed novel NW in which a character listens as her old school friend holds court in her tastefully decorated north-west London home. The talk is of children and schools and house prices, and in that moment the gulf between the two is seemingly laid bare, one listening in disbelief at how far the other has travelled from the council estate they once called home.
Yet behind that confident facade, the other woman is no less unsure about her place in the world, about the increasingly white and upper-middle-class world she moves in, about the part of London she still calls home that is inexorably changing day by day. It’s both a painfully acute dissection of how the bonds of old friendship bind us and a sharp commentary on race, class and modern London life. It could only have been imagined by Smith.
Ever since she burst on to the literary scene in 2000 at the age of only 24 with her first novel, White Teeth, an exuberant coming-of-age tale set in the north-west London community of Willesden, Smith has carved out a reputation as modern London’s finest chronicler. Her fourth novel, NW, a smart, spiky look at whether you can ever truly escape the past that defines you, cemented that reputation. Now this week sees the publication of her eagerly awaited fifth novel, Swing Time, a beautifully written, deeply melancholy meditation on fame and failure.
All three books depict a world that’s recognisably 21st-century London: diverse, vivid, at times cacophonous, stuffed full of dreams and aspirations, of fear and friction, where the houses of the wealthy abut the estates of the poor and tension simmers beneath the humour.
“London feels so real in her books – the characters feel like people I’ve met and know or talked to or sat next to on the bus,” says Nikesh Shukla, novelist and editor of much-praised essay collection, The Good Immigrant. “White Teeth felt like the city I grew up in and NW and Swing Time feel like the city I live in now. They’re very contemporary visions of London that don’t ignore the city’s tensions.”
They also depict a part of London too often ignored in favour of Soho’s seedy glamour, the fine houses of Kensington, Mayfair and Hampstead, or the raffish charm of period Islington and Notting Hill. Smith’s books sing of the suburbs that dot the north circular – Harlesden, Neasden, Wembley and, in particular, Willesden, that link between the inner city of Kilburn High Road and John Betjeman’s Metro-Land.
Smith has described London as “a state of mind” and her work stands out for the ease with which she pins the capital city to the page. “Her books present a working-class view of immigrants and ethnic identity,” says Ben Judah, author of This Is London: Life and Death in the World City. “Other writers have written about London well, but they do so from an upper-middle and middle-class background. When I read White Teeth I was blown away – it was the first time I’d read a book that spoke to the London I lived in.”
Shukla agrees. “Zadie’s London is the London I grew up in. It’s not just that I recognise the places, it’s that she writes about a London that’s both flawed and vibrant. She’s writing about the city as a person of colour and nothing is at arm’s length. Everything is real and visceral. You can touch and smell it.”
Where writers from Martin Amis to John Lanchester have covered the capital with a level of remove, as though circling the city from above to record its foibles, Smith writes from the bustling high streets of her youth, moving through the crowds purposefully like the native Londoner she is. “In Swing Time the city, the jobs I did, the pubs and places I know so well are all covered with deft accuracy,” says author and poet Salena Godden, whose memoir Springfield Road covers similar territory. “It resonated because I enjoyed visiting the psycho-geography of this time in my life.”
On one hand there is little new in this. Since Charles Dickens, writers have sought to burrow down into London’s core and expose the city’s teeming soul. In the 30s and 40s, Patrick Hamilton, Norman Collins and Gerald Kersh eagerly strode down its hidden back streets. In the 50s and 60s, Colin MacInnes’s London trilogy turned a journalist’s eye on the dreamers and schemers of Notting Hill and North Kensington, Derek Raymond probed Soho’s seamier edges and Sam Selvon wrote The Lonely Londoners, which remains probably the greatest exploration of London and the immigrant dream. In the 80s and early 90s, Alan Hollinghurst and Oscar Moore chronicled gay life in the capital, and Hanif Kureishi made his name with the 70s-set coming-of-age tale The Buddha of Suburbia. More recently, writers from Diran Adebayo, Courttia Newland and Patrick Neate to Linda Grant, Amanda Craig and Cathi Unsworth have adeptly captured the city’s chaotic rhythms in books as diverse and fascinating as London itself.
Yet Smith’s novels stand apart for their ability to convince the reader that they’re there, standing on those crowded streets alongside White Teeth’s self-conscious Irie or NW’s focused Natalie, or trudging into ballet class in a rundown church hall with Swing Time’s unnamed narrator.
“Even though I live in south-east London, I can see my London in the London she writes about,” says Rachel Bennette, who adapted NW for the BBC. “There’s a very strong flavour of the city that comes through her work and makes it incredibly exciting and cinematic. She’s very good at illuminating the things we don’t quite see and capturing a very, very mixed world. NW is an amazing book about social exclusion that is itself highly inclusive. It’s heavily populated and diverse and huge, like London itself.”
Interestingly, Smith’s eye has become only more acute the further she has moved from the neighbourhood of her birth. “She is now a semi-outsider spending half her time living in the States and half in London,” says Alex Clark, artistic director of the Bath Literature Festival. “But there’s no element of tourism in her writing; instead she retains an enormous affinity with the place she grew up in.”
It helps, perhaps, that just as London is both the consummate insider’s city and still a place where outsiders can flourish (just about), so Smith, now 41, is an elegant literary insider who retains an outsider’s eye. She has talked before of having once had two voices – the voice of her childhood and the voice she assumed on going to Cambridge – and how she “should have kept both alive in my mouth”. Instead the voice of her past is constantly re-imagined in her work.
“She’s one of those writers who goes back to the same patch over and over again and that creates a connection,” says Clark. “The world she’s describing, where new generations of different kinds of people came into an area and lived together in a relatively central part of London, is disappearing, and her work reflects that, both her fiction and her non-fiction.”
Perhaps because of that her most recent writing is less optimistic about the city she loves. In a typically acute essay on Brexit for the New York Review of Books, she challenged the notion that London stands fearlessly alone. “I kept reading pieces by Londoners speaking proudly of their multicultural, outward-looking city, so different from these narrow xenophobic places up north. It sounded right, and I wanted it to be true, but the evidence of my own eyes offered a counter-narrative,” she wrote.
“The painful truth is that fences are being raised everywhere in London. Around school districts, around neighbourhoods, around lives.”
Ultimately, too, the question lingers of whether it is fair to force one writer to carry the torch for a generation. Gooden suggests not. “Zadie Smith is the trailblazer for this generation and I look to her with great admiration and respect,” she says. “However, I think it’s a lot to ask one woman, one voice, one writer to carry the burden.”
Shukla agrees. “Zadie probably doesn’t want to be the voice of all people in London and to have that put on her is unfair, but at the same time her work did open a lot of doors.
“Slowly, more people are writing about London and that’s a good thing. I don’t think anyone does it as well as Zadie right now, but there are so many stories to tell about class and immigration and gentrification in the city. So many conversations still to be had.”
Swing Time is published by Hamish Hamilton, £18.99. NW is on BBC 2, on 14 November at 9pm
SPOTLIGHT ON SMITH
Born 25 October 1975, Willesden, north-west London.
Educated Hampstead Comprehensive, Cricklewood; King’s College, Cambridge.
Married To poet Nick Laird since 2004, with a daughter, Kit and a son, Harvey.
Best of times Whitbread first novel Award and the Guardian first book award and The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for White Teeth. Orange prize for Fiction and Man Booker Prize shortlisted for On Beauty. NW was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Named on Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in both 2003 and 2013
Worst of times Having to defend herself in 2005 after reportedly calling England ‘vulgar’.
They say ‘A joyous, optimistic, angry masterpiece… no better English novel will be published this year, or, probably, next.’ Philip Hensher on NW
She says ‘Bad reviews serve many purposes, not least… the gift of freedom: they release you from the obligation of having to read the book.’
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