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Abstract
This article traces Zadie Smith’s recurring, but shifting, engagement with North London in her works White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and The Embassy of Cambodia. It argues that underlying Smith’s changing aesthetic approaches to this particular space is an ethical agenda: an emphasis on the necessity to engage critically and responsibly with space (which Doreen Massey has read as a social construction that impacts powerfully on individuals and groups). After a consideration of the different approaches to, and functions of, North London in Smith’s first three novels, it focuses on her structural and metanarrative engagement with space in her more recent works. This gives way to reflections on agency, in light of the social determination of concrete spaces. Whereas Smith set out to create in White Teeth a representation of a quintessentially British space, it is what Massey refers to as a “global sense of space” – one that shapes national discourses – that manifests itself in her more recent literary North London.
Notes
1. That ethical concerns underlie Smith’s postmodernist writing has been repeatedly observed, for example by Sell (Citation2007) and Childs and Green (Citation2013).
2. Some characters stay “rooted” in Smith’s North London beyond White Teeth, and are referenced in NW in passages which record snippets of conversations: “People were ill. ‘You remember Mrs Iqbal? [ … ] Breast cancer’” (Smith Citation2012a, 217). Or: “‘But Irie was always going to be that kind of mother,’ said Ameeta” (221).
3. Chicken also makes its inevitable appearance in NW (Smith Citation2012a, 33–34, 59).
4. In On Beauty, impressions of North London are rendered in Jerome Belsey’s emails to his father Howard, and later through the focalizers Howard and Kiki (Smith Citation2006 3–7, 27–42, 275–309). These passages make up less than 10 percent of the novel.
5. Caldwell seems to be the only fictitious place-name in NW.
6. Natalie is a female form of the biblical name Nathan.
7. On the diegetic level, police cars and a helicopter seem to be following Nathan; at first, these seem like a curious response to Natalie’s flight. Drones are explored in Smith’s short story “Meet the President!” (Smith Citation2013a).
8. Lear and Gloucester are the prototypical outcasts straying in this space. In On Beauty, a section (“Glory of London”) entirely unconnected to the plot is devoted to the significance of this “sprawling North London parkland” (Smith Citation2006, 275-276).
9. The dates 6 and 20 August are mentioned explicitly, as are such temporal markers as “the following week” or “two weeks later”. Adding up the weeks, it is likely that the date on which the plot ends is 1 October. The sense that we drop in on Fatou’s story and then move on, not unlike the passing-by people of Willesden, is strongly conveyed.
10. In 2007, the Royal Embassy of Cambodia moved from a representative building in St. John’s Wood to a more modest one in Willesden Green, and is now the northernmost of London’s embassies.
11. The game also serves as a structuring device: rather than being organized in conventional chapters, its sections are superscripted “0–1” to “0–21”, like the 21 points that must be reached in a game of badminton.
12. Shar’s localness in this “two-mile square of the city”, to which Leah “is as faithful in her allegiance as other people are to their families, or their countries” (Smith Citation2012a, 5), wins Leah over.
13. A 37 bus operates nowhere near London NW. Natalie takes the 98 bus, which runs through Willesden, and the dying Felix beholds the 98 taking on passengers and moving on (Smith Citation2012a, 290, 148).
14. Hornsey Lane Bridge has for a long time been in the headlines as “Suicide Bridge”, hence the “obstructions”.
15. For a reading that links Smith’s spatial aesthetics with the notion of trauma, see Tew (Citation2014).
16. The Hanwells’ “foxiness” is explored beyond NW: in two of Smith’s recent short stories, “Hanwell in Hell” (Smith Citation2004) and “Meet the President!” (Smith Citation2013a), characters named “Hanwell” are connected with foxes.
17. “I am the sole author” also recurs as the headline of vignette 96 of “Host”, which centres on Natalie’s reflections on “strength” and “weakness” (Smith Citation2012a, 194).