Zadie Smith and the Form of the Historical Novel

Review of Zadie Smith, The Fraud

Abstract

While Zadie Smith’s fiction has often related feelings of social density and change through lengthy chronologies exploring generational difference, The Fraud is her first “proper” historical novel. Set over several decades in the nineteenth century, the novel imagines the interconnection between two characters on the fringe of the historical record: Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage, housekeeper, advisor, and former lover of the popular novelist William Ainsworth, and Andrew Bogle, an emancipated Jamaican who becomes a person of interest during the Tichborne affair, a sensational legal saga that occupied the public imagination for years. Smith’s status as one of the twenty-first century’s most prominent authors ensures that The Fraud will have a large audience. At the same time, however, many readers will likely complain about the difficulty the novel presents in its obscure references and challenging form. Unlike the authors of nineteenth-century historical romance, who frequently use their works to dramatize historical events and catalogue the habits, values, and languages of cultures on the verge of disappearance, Smith allows descriptions of her novel’s historical context to occupy a secondary position.  Events are referred to, but rarely elaborated on.  Instead, the novel’s chapters weave together brief, disjointed, and occasionally impressionistic episodes that only gradually cohere into something resembling a traditional plot. While these features demand a laser-like focus from the reader, Smith’s powers of characterisation and self-conscious centring of under-examined perspectives highlight The Fraud’s position as a significant accomplishment, both in terms of her own artistic development and the development of the historical novel as a genre.