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NW

3.34 of 5 stars 3.34 · rating details · 6,217 ratings · 1,229 reviews

This is the story of a city.

The northwest corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all.And many people in between.

Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.

And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold...more

Hardcover, 296 pages

Published September 4th 2012 by Hamish Hamilton (first published August 27th 2012)

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Sep 13, 2012 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: thank-you-bea-or-ala, distant-lands

ZADIE SMITH IS IN MY STORE RIGHT NOW!!!

i think zadie smith is good at writing.

for one thing, she has a real flair for location. i don't recall having been to northwest london (directions are hard) but i feel like i can see it, through the eyes of her characters.

she captures the cadence and speech-patterns of a broad swathe of london's immigrant denizens; irish, caribbean, caribbean-italian, algerian, maybe-indian, russian, tempered by the toughness of the council estates, smoothed out by educati...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Desiree rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: poc-author-content, own-ebook, literary-fiction-by-poc-grp, slugfest, finished-and-reviewed, gif-and-or-pic-review, read-ebook-format-epub, read-on-nook-touch

So uhm...

Like seriously? This was such a load of dreck. I can't even sit here and form coherent thoughts because I'm still so bewildered at the mess I just read. I guess all I can do is take a page out of the book and write the review by section and sub-heading because I'm really struggling to string words together that can represent my utter confusion and disgust. Here goes nothing...

Visitation Part Un: (I can't believe) This was the best section of the book and I really didn't want it to be be...more

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Apr 20, 2013 Fionnuala rated it 3 of 5 stars

...NW came to an end and I sat back in my seat and closed my eyes. I could still see images from the movie, long shots: the tower blocks of a north London suburb; two figures moving down a long dreary street; close-ups: a pair of ragged red slippers; the dirt encrusted fabric of a cheap blue tracksuit; all very vivid. How had those images fitted into the story line, I wondered? Had there been an actual story line, some unifying thread running through the whole? I was confused. I shook my head to...more

19 likes · like · see review

Sep 26, 2012 Proustitute rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: british-irish-scottish-literature, contemporary-fiction, 2012

Review published in The Millions: http://www.themillions.com/2012/09/la...

Zadie Smith’s fourth novel, NW, sees her return to Willesden, northwest London, the same setting as her debut novel, White Teeth. Her first novel in seven years, NW signifies a departure for Smith in terms of her prose as well as her thematic scope: not only is NW a more poetic and abstract novel, but it is also one that calls iteratively to its reader to “keep up!” Indeed, it is in the pacing and in the gaps amid the frac...more

40 likes · like · see review

Nov 02, 2012 Lee rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: potential-conflict-of-interest

The cover-flap copy makes this seem like a playfully pomo tragicomic treatise on contemporary city life but it seemed more like a simultaneously straightforward and purposefully skewed narrative exploration of superaccessible topics like long-term friendship, fluid identity (possibility of), order/chaos (extremes to which we might alternately lean when there's lack or excess of either), ye olde search for meaning in a world that rarely stays ordered forever.

All these themes are reflected in the...more

18 likes · like · see review

Oct 11, 2012 Ademption rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: british-literature, novels

A slow burn. I took a while to get into it, since NW is self-consciously experimental. Fifty pages in, and I remember why I love Zadie Smith. It is not that she helps my feeble mind recall the 90s: when airfare was cheap, globalism was novel, and being in a city with as much diversity and cultural incongruity as possible was the transcosmopolitan goal ("I was hanging out with this half-Jewish Jamaican guy last night. He's from Brazil, Sikh by choice, disclaims his birthright, vegan. We were smok...more A slow burn. I took a while to get into it, since NW is self-consciously experimental. Fifty pages in, and I remember why I love Zadie Smith. It is not that she helps my feeble mind recall the 90s: when airfare was cheap, globalism was novel, and being in a city with as much diversity and cultural incongruity as possible was the transcosmopolitan goal ("I was hanging out with this half-Jewish Jamaican guy last night. He's from Brazil, Sikh by choice, disclaims his birthright, vegan. We were smoking and listening to Russian rap online via Radio 3 Switzerland until 4am"). That's her big theme: interesting Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims and Africans living together in the dirty part of London in a country formerly only of boring white people. And the local colour is always more interesting for all their hard luck.

Whatever.

She always hooks me with incidental details. Half-faded decals of cartoon characters in a children's hospital. Her characters' use of smartphones and how the phones complicate social interactions, i.e. people using phones when they are with their friends, signalling they are bored, lonely, distracted. The mould that grows on the ceilings of unventilated apartments of people from hot countries who crank the heat in mid-winter. Seeing the wave of your friends have children, who then email you photo attachments of exhausted mother and child, in which the mothers look more sweaty, dishevelled, and alien to you than you've ever seen before. People's rooms being an expression of their inner states of mind.

I love her for these details alone, because I've been in these rooms and situations too many times. But she also fleshes out 4 fully realized people: Irish social worker, young black mechanic, professional black lady barrister, and a homeless guy (I've definitely met the lawyer). These characters, their lovers, parents, and dependants roam through Smith's old council estate, Willesden, and around to other similar neghbourhoods, causing drama, suffering, and struggling with the actual problems and non-problems of their late 20s and 30s.

Smith is still crap at endings. Her endings are abrupt, and always leave me flipping casually back through the book to see if the build-up warranted that kind of trailing off. I finally re-read the end, the beginning, shrug, and go on with my life. For her, it's the details and characters that matter.

Smith is maturing. NW is my favourite so far. (less)

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Sep 16, 2012 Jonfaith rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Apparently Professor Higgins was very diligent. He transcribed patterns of speech into his notebooks. He recorded as varied examples of dialect and pronunciation as possible. We all know the risks involved with those wax cylinders. Poor, poor, Professor Higgins.

Ms. Smith undertook a similar project with a similar intensity. She proved likewise pitch perfect. Speech pattern and intonation reign in NW. The remaining obstacle was plot. Everyone wants to be Trollope, no? Zadie is sage. She stuck to...more

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Jun 06, 2013 Antonomasia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Antonomasia by: Granta Best Young British Novelists collection, and (kind-of) MJ

Shelves: 2013, modern-british-fiction, granta-ybn-2013, london

[4.5] This, to me, is the breathtaking panorama of multi-everything London life that everyone else thought White Teeth was.
(That's pretty much the only sentence you need from this review... It's a really excellent book; the 0.5 off just constitutes several minor personal irritations.)

Most of the reasons I was less keen on Smith's first book – though I still did think it was good - could be bracketed as “in the shadow of Salman Rushdie”. (I've started four Rushdie books and never finished a sing...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Charlie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I should preface this review by letting you know that no, I have not yet read "White Teeth," so this review comes unbiased with no precedent set for comparison.

That being said, I really wanted to give this book four stars. It's a solid three and a half. And, had it not been for the ending, I would've rounded up to four stars. But here's why I didn't:

Smith gives her readers a couple loosely and not-so-loosely interconnected stories of some of the (un)lucky folks living in NW London. The writing...more

6 likes · like · see review

Sep 30, 2012 Felicia rated it 2 of 5 stars

I am sure that there are those that will disagree with my 2 star rating. I was excited to see that Zadie Smith had written a new work of fiction. I was towards the beginning of it when Anne Enright's review was published in the Times. The review was great, the book, not so much. I disliked the characters, their dishonesty and so much more. Sometimes when reading her writing, it is like being in a dreamlike state, you are not really sure what's going on. In a book you can return to the passage, w...more

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Oct 10, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels, sassysassenachs, distaff

This is the novel I hoped Zadie would write. Since On Beauty in 2006, she’s been brushing up on the post-Eggers American hipster canon, hanging with the Brooklyn crowd, writing dissertations on DFW. This structurally inventive, stylistically diverse and playful novel should have set my eyes aflame with love for the precocious stripling who wrote those three unwieldy social satires in her early-to-late twenties. But it didn’t. Divided into a series of cryptic sections with titles like ‘visitation...more

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Jan 14, 2013 Chidi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

: you know what? this is zadie's "pregnant brain" novel. (Pregnant brain: a term i heard for the first time during an episode of Tia and Tamera on Style Network. Tia would blame her forgetfulness on the maladies of Pregnant Brain. Everyone would nod. There was an understanding. They would eat cake pops and all was well with the world. Riveting.) i think the seed (haha) of this novel is her fear/anxiety/giddiness of become a mother. and this is the lens in which i read this intricate but scatterb...more
: you know what? this is zadie's "pregnant brain" novel. (Pregnant brain: a term i heard for the first time during an episode of Tia and Tamera on Style Network. Tia would blame her forgetfulness on the maladies of Pregnant Brain. Everyone would nod. There was an understanding. They would eat cake pops and all was well with the world. Riveting.) i think the seed (haha) of this novel is her fear/anxiety/giddiness of become a mother. and this is the lens in which i read this intricate but scatterbrained novel.

here are some characters who are trying to "figure some shit out", as they say. above them is The Narrative of Success. Aka "What you are supposed to" (i.e do good in school, go to college, find yourself, get a good job, get good money, have a house on the hill, get married, have kids, eat organic foods, be happy, etc.") our characters meander around this narrative. they want more. they are hungry for more. but the pimp hand of The Narrative of Success is so strong that an excursion to the dark side usually has some brutal consequences. this is depressing, if you think about it too much. you will be laid out on the hammock like leah. you say to yourself, "I WANT TO DO SOME AWESOME THING THAT NO ONE HAS DONE. WOOHOO! FCK ESTABLISHMENT." but the pull of security and The Normal has Level 10 magnetism, man. And then next thing you know, you are raising a hand in a law school class.

being a son of image-conscious Nigerians, i know very well about the pressure of The Narrative of Success and i am both driven and bored by it.

driven and bored, i tell you.

Driven: I want security. I want to be able to go to fancy dinners and not worry about my bank account. I want a job where people need me. I want to do something important. I want to have kids and teach them about jazz. I want to shop at Trader Joes and tell my friends about it. I want to make said friends at Trader Joes and talk to them about the kids who listen to Miles to fall asleep. The Birth of Cool.

Bored: The above shit is boring when you really think about it. Does any of this make one inherently happy? Or does our happiness come from comparing our supermarket reciepts (Whole Foods vs. Acme...Oh you get your produce from ACME...oh). I think Leah wonders if happiness is simply a function of comparison. If that is true, that is boring as hell.

There are no real conclusions on this axis. (on this axis? does that make sense?) this probably explains why the ending is as such.

i love zadie, though. she really can do no wrong with me. (less)

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Sep 23, 2012 Trish rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: audio, british, fiction, literature

Author Smith says NW is about language, and I agree. Language is central to our understanding of the characters, and language defines their lives in many ways. I had the good fortune to listen to the audio of this title, brilliantly read by Karen Bryson and Don Gilet. Having access to a paper copy at the same time, I feel confident that the spoken version is an aid to clarity and understanding, and there was true enjoyment in hearing the range of vocal virtuosity by both readers. I did end up l...more Author Smith says NW is about language, and I agree. Language is central to our understanding of the characters, and language defines their lives in many ways. I had the good fortune to listen to the audio of this title, brilliantly read by Karen Bryson and Don Gilet. Having access to a paper copy at the same time, I feel confident that the spoken version is an aid to clarity and understanding, and there was true enjoyment in hearing the range of vocal virtuosity by both readers. I did end up listening to it twice.

A clear example of how language can define one is the incident of a boneheaded young man with the posh accent, Tom, selling an old MG to the young man Felix, who had made great strides towards self-realization despite the tug of his background and the brake of his language. Any observer of that scene would immediately suspect Felix of putting the fix on when objectively that would be far from the case. And Keisha, or Natalie as she began calling herself, managed to change most things about her world when she changed her language. She became a barrister and even forgot what it was like to be poor.

But this novel is also about the process of becoming. To my way of thinking, there are only two central characters in the novel, Leah and Natalie. Both resist adulthood, but the choice is not really theirs to make. They become adults despite their attempts to hold back the process, and end up making decisions that demonstrate authorial control over their own lives, stopping their ears to very loud protestations from their inner selves. Therefore they land in adulthood awkwardly, splay-legged and wrong-footed, and must find a way to right themselves again before acknowledging they are older, wiser, and already there.

Several other minor characters, e.g., Annie and Nathan, manage to avoid true adulthood altogether by burying their options beneath addictions. Felix was the one that was most consciously “becoming.” He strove daily to be a better man--for his woman, for himself, for his future family. He made himself happy doing it. He got clean, “was conscious,” and made himself and his family proud. But demons chased him down. Maybe you can’t really ever get free.

In the last third of the book, a 50-something female barrister “role model” dressed in a gold satin shirt beneath the expected blazer, and a diamante trim to de rigueur black court shoes tells Natalie: '“Turn yourself down. One notch. Two. Because this is not neutral.” She passed a hand over her neat frame from her head to her lap, like a scanner. “This is never neutral.”'

Of course I’d heard of Zadie Smith, but I’d never read her early work. She was so popular when she first came into print that I decided to wait to form my own opinion when the clamour died down. Sometimes it is so noisy out there when a new, talented author is heralded that I can’t hear myself think.

I never had the feeling while reading this novel that Smith was haphazard in her choice of images or language. The novel is constructed and in the end one looks up to see graffiti covering a wall with violent scribbles of bright color. Overlaid, a couple words traced in black paint stand out over the rest: SEX RACE CLASS
(less)

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Dec 08, 2012 Rose rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

At first I thought Zadie Smith was channeling Virginia Woolf in her latest novel, only instead of haute bourgeois characters, she focused on an upwardly mobile working class girl from the projects, who commits the unlikely act of doling out real money to a dirty, hysterical junkie who turns up at her door with an obviously fake story. There was something so flaccid and hopeless about Leah Hanwell seen through the lens of her random thoughts and fragmentary observations. And Zadie Smith has done...more

3 likes · like · see review

Nov 04, 2012 Sabrina marked it as to-read

Shelves: books-i-struggled-with-and-left-beh

September! Ugh!

4 likes · like · see review

Sep 02, 2012 Adam rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 1970-present, prose

I received an advance reading copy through a Penguin Canada giveaway on goodreads.

This book is formally confident and free from restraint. Smith has the guts and brains to pull off a narrative about people, all from NW London, who end up living through vastly different experiences but share in common certain key details, including their part of London, a very different London than the one I knew through, primarily, Fulham. Nothing about the novel feels particularly artificial, though it has eno...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Ray rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So as a city kid myself, I find it impossible not to like Zadie Smith's work. I guess it's a matter of a shared sensibility. Lugubrious attention to the smallest details of a neighborhood and a community have always defined my life and they do for Smith too. (Of course there are plenty of non-urban people who are as interested in their environments. A lot more happens in cities though.)

I can't say anything that hasn't already been said about Smith's interest and attention to form. Smith puts wor...more So as a city kid myself, I find it impossible not to like Zadie Smith's work. I guess it's a matter of a shared sensibility. Lugubrious attention to the smallest details of a neighborhood and a community have always defined my life and they do for Smith too. (Of course there are plenty of non-urban people who are as interested in their environments. A lot more happens in cities though.)

I can't say anything that hasn't already been said about Smith's interest and attention to form. Smith puts words together in a way that is forward-thinking and derivative at once: a highly prized trait in our post-20th century world.

For every moment in NW that I had to stop and say "oh my God, I can't believe how she just nailed that [insert some seminal urban experience that no one--maybe Paul Beatty--has ever put into print]," there were many more where I thought "stop being so damn self-conscious and annoying the hell out of me!"

Self-conciousness is probably the defining theme of NW but I had trouble figuring out whether Smith was dissecting it or embracing it. Maybe this is the case in the suburbs too, but city kids--at least in multi-racial environments--pay a lot of attention to detail and to the markers (clothes, sneakers, neighborhoods, music) of others in an attempt to define themselves. And it's pretty exhausting. Which is why I suppose I appreciated the moment when the character of Nathan Bogle in NW says "Oh Nathan, 'member this, 'member that--truthfully Keisha, I don't remember. I've burned that whole business out of my brain. Different life. No use to me."

The self-conciousness that Smith describes is not really that of any city kid, but of the one who had the chance--or at least who thinks they have had the chance--to get the broader view on class, race and opportunity and do something different than what was expected of them. In an urban environment, it's easier--at least on paper--to mingle and mix and merge with people a lot different from those you come from. However, the reality is that just like most of the people in the world, most city kids don't venture beyond the bounds of the family and society into which they were born.

So NW is really the tale of the native outsider. In this sense, Smith is the absolutely classic English writer--think Brideshead or Forrester--pouring gallons of ink out about the angst of not easily fitting in to a life of a privilege.

I suppose my biggest complaint about Smith is that for her all of sophistication regarding theme and structure, she's not much of a plotter.

The need of human beings to maintain/create/dissolve identity is unquestioned. Does it need to be so dramatized though? Do Leah and Natalie's secrets (everyone has secrets after all--holding on to a piece of information that no one else, or at least no one else you care about, knows is in my mind essential to the formation of identity) have to result in such big, catastrophic narrative-shifting moments? Also: is there anything other to say about Felix's fate than urban literature cliche? And the character of Nathan is literally a cipher whose ultimate role is to tie up the plot? Come on Zadie. Lame.

Despite these problems, I ended up really enjoying and taking away a lot from NW. And look forward to reading it a few more times.

PS- I hated the first section, was slightly confused though engaged by the second and then was enthralled by the third on. So, if you are trying to read this, be patient. It gets better.

(less)

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Apr 01, 2013 Claire McAlpine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Loved it for the location and memories of life on the Kilburn High Rd and NW London. But the various degrees of melancholia stop me rating it any higher. The one character that could have brought us out of all that or provided a balance to the story, meets a sad, abrupt end. Mixed feelings indeed.

I enjoyed the experimental feel to it and how the writing changed with each character, visually interesting.

My full review here at Word by Word.

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Aug 13, 2012 Caitlin marked it as abandoned

Writing the way some people speak and think (incomplete thoughts and sentence fragments) makes this not worth the reading time for me. I do not care for this writing style and abandoned this book after an hour. No star rating.

Long lashes. Babies look like this. Leah smiles. The smile offered back is blank, without recognition. Sweetly crooked. Leah is the only good stranger who opened the door and did not close it again. Shar repeats: you are so good, you are so good

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Jun 10, 2013 Holly DeMark rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fight-club

If this book had been about the south side of Chicago (read: if I'd understood the majority of the cultural references), I would have enjoyed it more. I always felt like she was craftily describing something, a way of life and a specific subculture, but it was always just out of reach for me. I liked some sections and storytelling styles better than others. I identified better with Leah, whose perspective dominated the first half of the book, but I felt like I lost her a bit at the end - though...more

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Oct 28, 2012 Indu Vashist rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is Zadie's best work yet. It is written in non-linear way. Perhaps a bit more experimental than her earlier work. Overall, the tone captures the crisis of 30 somethings living within the recession, trying to understand the decline of the welfare state, in the intimate sphere.

Her approach to race, gender and sexuality are muted and thoughtful. It is not the slap in the face of White Teeth, the characters' race reveals itself slowly. It is through behaviours and ideas that their race comes t...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Misha rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: british, doorway-language, doorway-setting, friendship, icky-sex, multiple-perspectives, read-2012, modern-malaise

I liked this more than I thought I would and would give it 4 stars only GR seems to be glitchy at the moment. After the staccato first section, I got into the book more. Smith is really good at looking into the modern malaise--the problematic divide between what we want to achieve, what success looks like and then feels like and how satsifaction is hard to find. I found some of the themes a little problematic, but overall enjoyed the ride. Oh, but sex is portrayed in a less than flattering way--...more

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Nov 30, 2012 Larou added it

Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth has been part of my TBR pile (actually, it’s more a TBR mountain range) for quite a while now, but I never got around to reading it. I’m going to have to dig it out though, because finishing her latest left me with the urge to read more of her work. NW - as it is called after the London District where most of it takes place – grips readers right from the start – not by drawing them in with its plot, but by assaulting them with a burst of almost raw sensory d...more

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Jun 16, 2013 Donovan Richards rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Power of Place

The power of place reverberates much further than any of us dare to admit. While we all hold unique personalities, the broad regions and specific communities around which we orbit influence us profoundly.

This reality causes people to offer broad stereotypes for different regions. For example, Seattleites are known for surface-level pleasantries but you better not expect them to open up any further.

Or, people from the Midwest are warm and friendly; you could grab a beer with any...more

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Jun 11, 2013 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Tough book to review.

Zadie Smith is my favorite contemporary novelist. I love all of her prior novels, but had a tougher time with this one.

The highlight of this book, as with all of her other books, is the extreme empathy she has for all of her characters. Smith's books have good guys and bad guys, but they never come off that way. Smith has a wonderful ability to make even the worst decisions comprehensible. That's present here in spades, and I love it.

The narrative structure is much looser in...more

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May 16, 2013 Madeline rated it 3 of 5 stars

I finished this book more than a week ago, but this is the first time I've been able to make myself sit down and write a review. The problem isn't that I've been trying to decide what I want to talk about, the problem is that I don't really have much to say about this book at all.

The story is divided into four mini-arcs, all taking place in the same neighborhood in northwest London. We start with Leah, a white woman (the neighborhood is predominately black, and mostly Caribbean). Her section sho...more I finished this book more than a week ago, but this is the first time I've been able to make myself sit down and write a review. The problem isn't that I've been trying to decide what I want to talk about, the problem is that I don't really have much to say about this book at all.

The story is divided into four mini-arcs, all taking place in the same neighborhood in northwest London. We start with Leah, a white woman (the neighborhood is predominately black, and mostly Caribbean). Her section shows us several days in her life - going to work, interacting with her husband, visiting her friends, etc. Then at the end of her section, she hears about some guy being stabbed in the street. The next section is from the guy's perspective and takes place the day he was killed. Then we move on to the third section, which is about Leah's friend Natalie and provides us with background information on the girls' friendship. Then in the last section, Natalie meets up with some guy she went to school with and they wander around the neighborhood. And then the book ends.

It's Zadie Smith, so the writing is incredible. Everything is very, very subtle, so that you often have to read conversations several times before you understand the subtext of what's being said. The characters are all really good - all of them are sympathetic and none of them are good, and they are all very, very real - and Smith creates a near-flawless portrait of a small isolated community.

So then, what's the problem? The problem is that, lovely as the writing is, the fact remains that nothing fucking happens. We just watch four people dick around and be miserable for a while, and then the book stops. Nothing else. Normally, I wouldn't have minded this. I said in my review Hunting and Gathering that a plot is not necessary for a book to be good, and I stand by that. NW is another example of a book that's character-driven rather than plot-driven, but the problem here is that we're not driving anywhere, we're just treading water. Again, I might have been able to forgive this, but the four characters remained only tenuously connected, and the events that occur during their sections having no real effect on the outcome of the story. I wanted this to end like A Prayer for Owen Meany, where every single character and event throughout the book turns out to be an important factor in the climax, and everything fits together neatly. That doesn't happen here, and it's disappointing, and ultimately makes the book not worth the effort of reading it. (less)

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Apr 30, 2013 Corinne added it · review of another edition

Zadie Smith seems to always come out on the right side of the line where style overtakes substance, and it is so with this novel. The book's sections focus on the lives of three different people, two of whom who have been friends since childhood. Smith manages to create a distinct voice and interior life for each of the three. All of them have grown up in the NW of the title, a reference to the northwest of London, and more specifically to the particular neighborhood in which the characters grew...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Liz rated it 4 of 5 stars

Leah and Natalie were brought up in a dodgy part of North-West London by mothers who were determined their daughters would better themselves. When the book opens, the two women are 32, still living in the area but ostensibly far from their council estate origins. In accounting for their unravelling, Zadie Smith has written a dark, entertaining meditation on race, class and society in the modern melting pot.

I wish I could make my mind up about Smith's books. Her writing is amazing, but her charac...more Leah and Natalie were brought up in a dodgy part of North-West London by mothers who were determined their daughters would better themselves. When the book opens, the two women are 32, still living in the area but ostensibly far from their council estate origins. In accounting for their unravelling, Zadie Smith has written a dark, entertaining meditation on race, class and society in the modern melting pot.

I wish I could make my mind up about Smith's books. Her writing is amazing, but her characters are elusive, frustrating and often unlikeable. I hated On Beauty when I read it several years ago, but I zipped through NW as quickly as I could while also taking the time to appreciate her organic approach to the text.

The novel is full of literary tricks that I occasionally suspected were there mainly to dazzle the reader into not noticing the lack of substance behind them - the description of a walk, for example, that reads like something out of a book of writing exercises ("Walk along a familiar route and note down everything that you experience, making sure to use all five senses."). Sure, Smith executes the exercise with a flourish and confidence that would be beyond most writers, but I still wasn't convinced.

The section describing Keisha/Natalie's childhood in a series of short sketches is wonderful: hilarious and horribly pointed. However, I found myself slightly bored with the technique as the story moved right through to the present day - which was frustrating, since Natalie's dilemma (who or what is she?) seems to be at the heart of the book.

Perhaps part of what makes this book so frustrating is that the characters don't behave like characters in a novel. They don't really learn anything (although I felt that I as a reader did - and perhaps that is all that matters?); by the end of the book they are still falling into the same traps in which they were caught at the beginning. On the other hand, I rather loved the ending for that reason, as well as hating it. And if a book makes me this conflicted, this angry, this alive - well, I should probably keep reading Zadie Smith.(less)

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Apr 20, 2013 Jon Stout rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: minorities and majorities

Recommended to Jon by: Sarah Perry-Stout

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, is not the joyous, zany, multi-cultural adventure that I had found in her previous novels. It is not joyous at all, but rather a gritty chronicle of women’s friendships as they try to make lives for themselves in the low-income housing projects of London (euphemistically called “estates”). The central friendship, between Natalie and Leah, survives the struggle in each of them to succeed in the world’s terms while being authentic somehow to themselves.

Smith has sai...more Zadie Smith’s latest novel, NW, is not the joyous, zany, multi-cultural adventure that I had found in her previous novels. It is not joyous at all, but rather a gritty chronicle of women’s friendships as they try to make lives for themselves in the low-income housing projects of London (euphemistically called “estates”). The central friendship, between Natalie and Leah, survives the struggle in each of them to succeed in the world’s terms while being authentic somehow to themselves.

Smith has said in an interview that, although she had been raised to think that she could do anything a man could do, she had come to the conclusion that women are different, even though equal to men. This conclusion rubs me the wrong way, but from an author I admire as much as I do Zadie Smith, I have to pay attention. Throughout the book, there are thoughts and reflections on pregnancy and child-rearing, and I have no doubt that Smith accurately reflects the experience that she and other women have. The men do their part honorably, but Smith doesn’t imagine the complexity of feeling that they might have. I have no doubt that she is reporting honestly, but I see it as history, not destiny.

There is a fatalism to much of the book, not at all unrealistic in the context of an inner city environment. Natalie, the most fully-explored figure, has the drive to become a barrister, although she still defines herself in the terms of her childhood friends. A reviewer points out that Smith only gives the race of a character if the character is not black, reversing the de facto convention. Though Smith takes for granted a race-free pride and dignity on the part of her characters, they cannot escape the expectations that society has toward their part of London, and Smith’s frustration and anger with this dilemma is expressed throughout.

Zadie Smith is still my favorite novelist of the twenty-first century, and she is unparalleled at reflecting the feelings and dialogue of our age. But I miss her soaring optimism and her vision of a successfully multi-cultural society. I have the feeling that Zadie Smith herself has completely transcended the “estates” of her NW London origins, but perhaps she knows otherwise and feels obliged to write about the life she has actually experienced. At least she has made me feel respect and sympathy for the characters she has described.
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Apr 11, 2013 Kasey rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

My very first Zadie Smith, and it blew me away. The loneliness at the core of so many of the characters, in spite of their immersion in a crowded city, a tight-knit community. The depth and complicatedness of their emotional lives, and the way those lives are mysterious even to the characters themselves, how puzzled they are by their own existences. The way ZS gives all of her characters--even those present for one or two pages--that same complexity and emotional range. The presence of a particu...more

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About Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith (born Sadie Smith October 27, 1975) is an English novelist. To date she has written four novels, and is widely regarded as one of England's most talented young authors; in 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadie_Smith

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Quotes from NW

“Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources.” — 9 people liked it

“She had that thing most people don't have - curiosity. She might not have always got the right answers, but she wanted to ask the questions. It's very hard if you are interested in ideas and all that, ideas and the philosophies of the past, it's very hard to find someone around here to really talk to. That's the tragedy of the thing really I mean, when you think about it. Certainly I can't find anyone around here to talk to anymore. And for a woman it's even harder you see. They can feel very trapped - because of the patriarchy. I do feel everyone needs to have these little chats now and then.” — 5 people liked it

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