Reading Zadie Smith by -

Author:-
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472517159
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

The seemingly casual encounter and brief exchange is still replete with underlying meaning and narrative purpose, demonstrating an on-going feature of Smith’s writing that Philip Tew notes in Zadie Smith (2009) as follows: ‘Smith’s technique of overlaying and multiplying view-points, often refracted by others, is highly effective, adding depth to her perspectives’ (102). The distinction between the public and private registers runs through the passage above, demonstrating the often suppressed conflict between the two, a seemingly social demand that one acts or speaks as the group does which is undercut by inner, mostly private views and desires, one antithetical to the other.

While all three main characters are products of the same marginalized racial and socioeconomic environment, they each exhibit distinctive responses to the circumstances in which they were brought up (with only the two women being ‘born and bred’). The only white character of the three, Leah displays the least interest in rising above her upbringing, settling for a middling education and a low-paying job in a local social agency. Unlike her African-born husband Michel, a hairdresser who tries to better their lot through on-line trading, Leah prefers a life of indolence, smoking dope with her neighbours and wishing to remain ‘eighteen always’ (22) in her mind. In a sense, Leah occupies the stereotypical position of ambitionless under-achievement often assigned by mainstream British culture to immigrant and non-white Londoners. On the other hand, Natalie, who changes her name from Keisha to distance herself from her impoverished black heritage, is relentlessly ambitious, willing to reject her family and her religion to pursue a legal career; as a young woman, she ‘thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization’ (177). After leaving her Christian boyfriend Rodney for the more financially successful Frank De Angelis, an investment banker, Natalie becomes ‘crazy busy with self-invention’ (183), fabricating a white middle-class lifestyle that Leah finds hypocritical, thinking of Natalie as a ‘coconut’ (55) who is black only on the outside. Natalie lives ‘just far enough’ from the council estate (housing project) ‘to avoid it’, while Leah ‘can see it from her backyard’ (55).

Between these two extremes lies Felix, an incomer to Caldwell in childhood, the son of a Rastafarian father and an absent schizophrenic mother, who began life as a stereotypical lower-class black male, directionless and in trouble with the law. After completing a General National Vocational Qualification in catering, he bounced around to a number of low-paying jobs, including various ill-conceived ventures with his father Lloyd, before doing gopher jobs for the film industry and becoming a drug-dealer and addict. Having had two children when he was young, Felix rarely sees them, unable to cope with their mother Jasmine, ‘an oppositional woman’ (112). The reinvented Felix, an aficionado of self-help books and motivational slogans, has cleaned himself up, determined to turn his life around, and is working relatively steadily as a mechanic. In keeping with his name, he claims ironically (given his fate) to have ‘always been lucky’ (110),

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