Two Paths for the Novelist

“I wanted to know what it was like to be everybody,” the British novelist Zadie Smith wrote of her childhood. “Above all, I wondered what it would be like to believe the sorts of things I didn’t believe.” These chameleon longings have always animated her fiction, which in the nearly 25 years since the publication of White Teeth has wandered over a seemingly random terrain of subjects and styles. Nevertheless, this desire is the closest thing her work has made to an argument. The purpose of novels, as Smith sees it, is to give writers as well as readers imagined access to the minds and experiences of other people, full stop. Not everyone considers that end sufficient in itself, but even those who do must admit that an ethos so willing to subsume itself in other points of view risks losing its compass. Smith has an alarming tendency—in a writer so confident—to take critics’ views of her novels too seriously. When she drifts from the wellspring of vitality that drives her best work, it’s often some idea about what novels ought to be that has distracted her. Her new novel, The Fraud, feels like a mad sprint away from such influences into the fogeyish realm of historical fiction. Sequestered there, she succeeds in rekindling her old mojo.