Not Quite Under Our Skin

Zadie Smith’s sparkling new novel, The Fraud, examines the sins that we commit, the loves that perplex us, and the masks that we wear, knowingly or otherwise. As befits a story set in Victorian England, it boasts a colorful set of players—lords and dandies, writers and lawyers, cads and drunks, slaves and footmen, wits and witches. The book floats deftly above the greatest trial of the late nineteenth century, despite being soggy with the progressive pieties of the early twenty-first.