The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

Overview

From the New York Times bestselling author of Swing Time and one of the most revered writers of her generation comes an "intelligent ... exquisitely clever [novel] about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality” (The Boston Globe).

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. His business is to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them, and occasionally fake them—all to give the people what they want: a little piece of Fame. But what does Alex want? Only the return of his father, the end of religion, something for his headache, three different girls, infinite grace, and the rare autograph of forties movie actress Kitty Alexander. With fries.

The Autograph Man is a deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. It offers further proof that Zadie Smith is one of the most staggeringly talented writers of her generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375703874
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/17/2003
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	First Vintage International Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

ZADIE SMITH is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia, three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free, and Intimations, and a short story collection, Grand Union. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

October 27, 1975

Place of Birth:

Willesden, London, England

Education:

B.A. in English, King's College at Cambridge University, 1998

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

You’re either for me or against me, thought Alex-Li Tandem, referring to the daylight and, more generally, to the day. He stretched flat and made two fists. He was fully determined to lie right here until he was given something to work with, something noble, something fine. He saw no purpose in leaving his bed for a day that was against him from the get-go. He had tried it before; no good could come from it.

A moment later he was surprised to feel a flush of warm light dappled over him, filtered through a blind. Nonviolent light. This was encouraging. Compare and contrast with yesterday morning’s light, pettily fascist, cruel as the strip lighting in a hospital hallway. Or the morning before yesterday morning, when he had kept his eyes closed for the duration, afraid of whatever was causing that ominous red throb beneath the eyelids. Or the morning before that, the Morning of Doom, which no one could have supposed would continue for seventy-two hours.

NOW OPTIMISTIC, ALEX grabbed the bauble that must be twisted to open blinds. His fingers were too sweaty. He shuttled up the bed, dried his left hand on the wall, gripped and pulled. The rain had come in the night. It looked as if the Flood had passed through Mountjoy, scrubbed it clean. The whole place seemed to have undergone an act of accidental restoration. He could see brickwork, newly red-faced and streaky as after a good weep, balconies with their clean crop of wet white socks, shirts and sheets. Shiny black aerials. Oh, it was fine. Collected water had transformed every gutter, every depression in the pavement, into prism puddles. There were rainbows everywhere.

Alex took a minute to admire the gentle sun that kept its mildness even as it escaped a gray ceiling of cloud. On the horizon a spindly church steeple had been etched by a child over a skyline perfectly blue and flatly colored in. To the left of that sat the swollen cupola of a mosque, described with more skill. So people were off to see God, then, this morning. All of that was still happening. Alex smiled, weakly. He wished them well.

IN HIS BATHROOM, Alex was almost defeated by the discovery of a sequence of small tragedies. There was an awful smell. Receptacles had been missed. Stuff was not where stuff should be. Stepping over stuff, ignoring stuff, stoic Alex turned to the vanity mirror. He yanked it towards him by its metal neck until its squares became diamonds, parallelograms, one steel line. He had aged, terribly. The catch in his face, the one that held things up, this had been released. But how long was it since he had been a boy? A few days? A year? A decade? And now this?

He bared his teeth to the mirror. They were yellow. But on the plus side, they were there. He opened his Accidental eyes (Rubinfine’s term: halfway between Oriental and Occidental) wide as they would go and touched the tip of his nose to the cold glass. What was the damage? His eyes worked. Light didn’t hurt. Swallowing felt basic, uncomplicated. He was not shivering. He felt no crippling paranoia or muscular tremors. He seized his penis. He squeezed his cheeks. Present, correct. Everything was still where it appears in the textbooks. And it seemed unlikely that he would throw up, say, in the next four hours, something he had not been able to predict with any certainty for a long time. These were all wonderful, wonderful developments. Breathing heavily, Alex shaved off three days’ worth of growth (had it been three days?). Finishing up, he cut himself only twice and applied the sad twists of tissue.

Teeth done, Alex remembered the wear-and-tear deposit he had paid his landlord and shuffled back to the bedroom. He needed a cloth, but the kitchen was another country. Instead he took a pillowcase, dipped it in a glass of water and began to scrub at the handprint on the wall. Maybe it looked like art? Maybe it had a certain presence? He stepped back and looked at it, at the grubby yellow outline. Then he scrubbed some more. It didn’t look like art. It looked like someone had died in the room. Alex sat down on the corner of his bed and pressed his thumbs to his eyes to stop two ready tears. A little gasp escaped him. And what’s remarkable, he thought, what’s really amazing, is this, is how tiny the actual thing was in the first place. This thing that almost destroyed me. Two, no, maybe three days ago he had placed a pill on his tongue, like a tiny communion wafer. He’d left it there for ten seconds, as recommended, before swallowing. He had never done anything like this before. Nothing could have prepared him! Moons rose, suns fell, for days, for nights, all without him noticing!

Legal name: Microdot. Street name: Superstar. For a time it had made itself famous all through his body. And now it was over.

Reading Group Guide

“Intelligent. . . . Exquisitely clever. . . . An ironic commentary about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality.” —The Boston Globe

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith’s remarkable novel about life, death, and the search for the ultimate signature.

1. The text of The Autograph Man is interrupted by drawings, unusual typography, diagrams, lists, boxed jokes, and other features not normally found in novels. What do these add to the story? How do they change the texture of the book? What do they indicate about Zadie Smith’s attitude toward her story and toward the conventions of the literary novel?

2. What emotional impact does his father’s death have on Alex Li-Tandem? In what ways does it determine much of what he does and does not do during the rest of the novel? Does he achieve an acceptance of his father’s death and undergo any sort of healing process by the end of the story?

3. Brian Duchamp tells Alex, “Women are the answer. They are. If you’ll only let them into the story. Women. They are the answer” [p. 144]. Why does he say this to Alex? Is he right? In what sense do women turn out to be “the answer” for Alex?

4. When Kitty Alexander discovers that Alex is the author of the letters she has found so moving, she says, “it worries me that you write these. Why did you write? You are really too young even to remember my last film, no matter my first…. There is no girlfriend, or she is not effective. There is a lack somewhere. I think this must be true” [p. 240]. Why does Alex write so many letters to Kitty? Why is he so fixated on her? Is Kitty right in pointing to Alex’s less than happy love life as a reason?

5. Throughout the novel, Alex and other characters make international gestures for any number of things, from “He’s crazy” to “shut up,” and usually these have a comic effect. But near the end of the novel, when Alex suggests that the Kaddish ceremony is “nothing more [than] a gesture,” Adam asks: “What’s more important than a gesture?” [p. 340]. In what ways are gestures both comic and seriously communicative in the novel? In what ways are they significant?

6. Alex grows hysterical observing autograph collectors at the convention in New York. “As if the world could be saved this way! As if impermanence were not the golden rule! And can I get Death’s autograph, too? Have you got a plastic sheath for that, Mr. Autograph Man?” [p. 207]. What function does collecting and selling autographs serve for Alex?

7. When Honey and Alex find Kitty’s apartment, Alex thinks it’s too easy. “This just doesn’t happen that I want something and then it’s just there. With no effort,” to which Honey replies, “Baby, that’s exactly how it happens.” Later she adds, “The plan is no plan.” [p. 226]. Is Honey the most “Zen” character in The Autograph Man? Why would Zadie Smith make a prostitute perhaps the wisest figure in the book?

8. The Autograph Man doesn’t have a conventional plot, where unfolding actions drive the narrative. What elements create and sustain the reader’s interest in the absence of a strongly defined plot? Can The Autograph Man be considered a postmodern fiction?

9. What kinds of relationships does Alex have with his friends? With Esther? What do they all, at one point or another, try to tell him about himself?

10. What does The Autograph Man suggest about the role that race, ethnicity, and religion play in shaping personal identity? To what extent do the characters in the novel define themselves along these lines?

11. When Alex fills out the hotel questionnaire, he offers a pithy, one sentence summary of his philosophy of life: “Regret everything and always live in the past” [p. 247]. Is he merely joking, or does this statement reflect the way he sees and lives his life?

12. Why is Alex writing a book that divides the world and everything in it into the categories of Jewish and Goyish? How do his friends regard this endeavor?

13. During a fierce argument near the end of the book, Alex says to Esther, “it’s like you think I have, like, the morals of a sewer rat, or something,” to which Esther replies, “Let’s not talk about morals. Let’s not do that” [p. 331]. What is the cause of Alex’s shabby behavior towards Esther? Is it a moral issue?

14. In what ways can the novel, as a whole, be read as a critique of modern western culture? How do the characters, in the way they live their lives, exemplify this critique?

Editorial Reviews

Intelligent. . . . exquisitely clever. . . . an ironic commentary about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality.” —The Boston Globe

“The same bracing intelligence and salty humor that distinguished her debut. . . . Smith scatters marvelous sentences and sharp insights on nearly every page.” —LA Times

“A lovely surprise. Zadie Smith . . . has come out with a second book that is actually better than its predecessor: its dialog funnier, its language even more plugged in, more wired.” —Esquire

“A preternaturally gifted . . . writer [with] a voice that’s street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time.” —The New York Times

“Savvy, witty and exuberant.” —New York Daily News

“Smith is young and smart, and . . . she proves to be an amazingly gifted writer.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Smith writes sharp dialogue for every age and race–and she’s funny as hell.” —Newsweek

“[Zadie Smith] possesses a more than ordinary share of talent.” —USA Today

“Absolutely delightful.” —Chicago Tribune

“Smith’s clever, aphoristic observations and snappy dialogue are so delightful they tend to become addictive. . . . [The Autograph Man is] always entertaining.” —Elle

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
After a remarkable debut with White Teeth, Zadie Smith returns with an equally remarkable novel that reaffirms her talent, intelligence, and impressive literary range.

The eponymous Autograph Man is Alex Li-Tandem, an Anglo-Chinese Jew obsessed with the "Jewish/Goyish" dichotomy he sees everywhere around him. We first encounter Alex at age 13, attending a wrestling match with his father, Li-Jin, and discovering the arcane world of the autograph collector. Shortly afterward, Li-Jin dies from a wildly metastasizing brain tumor. Both events exert a powerful influence on Alex.

Fifteen years later, Alex is a professional autograph collector, leading a disorderly existence in the London suburb of Mountjoy. He's still haunted by Li-Jin's death, is perversely unfaithful to his girlfriend, and is obsessed with a retired, largely forgotten B-movie actress named Kitty Alexander. Convinced that he carries the same lethal cancer gene that killed is father, he stumbles through the "broken world" of contemporary London, collecting and selling celebrity autographs, which are to him potent symbols of a spurious immortality. Over the course of several hectic, drunken days, he travels to America, encounters the aging Kitty Alexander, makes a killing in the autograph market, and confronts his deepest feelings for his father.

The Autograph Man is stylish, witty, surprising, and erudite. Smith writes with wisdom, compassion, and uncommon grace about an odd corner of the world and the eccentric men and women who inhabit it, confirming her reputation as an original, highly observant writer with enormous gifts and virtually unlimited potential. Bill Sheehan

If The Autograph Man were Zadie Smith's first novel, it would likely win praise for being smart, funny and provocative, though perhaps overly familiar in its selection of subject—the commodification of celebrity. Smith's tale of an autograph dealer named Alex-Li Tandem and his quest for the holy grail of signatures is both a breezy read and an ironic allegory on how celebrity has become a religion. Yet in comparison with Smith's 2000 debut novel, White Teeth, the multicultural, multigenerational epic that made such a deserved splash, her follow-up feels slight. If the order were reversed, The Autograph Man would be promising, and White Teeth would be a promise fulfilled. Even so, you couldn't flip-flop the thematic progression, because it was White Teeth that turned Smith into a literary supernova, and The Autograph Man is her meditation on that fame.

As grist for the journalistic mill, Smith arrived practically made to order: young (twenty-one when she wrote her first novel; twenty-four when it was published), gifted and multiracial, photogenic and outspoken. Reviews almost invariably compared her with Salman Rushdie (who loved White Teeth), as if any "outsider" author exploring London's ethnicities were a member of the same exotic tribe.

As in her first novel, Smith's panoply of indelibly crafted characters shows her ear for diverse dialect and her eye for the telling detail. The book invokes a litany of cross-cultural references that extend from religious mysticism (the novel's first half is framed as Lenny Bruce–inspired commentary on the Jewish Kabbalah; the second half deals in pop Zen) to one-liner takeoffs on Allen Ginsberg and Vladimir Nabokov. Thoughfolk poet Leonard Cohen plays a minor but pivotal role, the touchstone the novel recalls most strongly—whether consciously or not—is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book that similarly examines the existential malaise through a protagonist's tunnel-vision obsession.

"You watch too many films is one of the great modern sentences," writes Smith. "It has in it a hint of understanding regarding what we were before and what we have become. Of few people has it been more true than Alex-Li Tandem, Autograph Man extraordinaire."

Smith's protagonist is a twenty-seven-year-old London suburbanite who carries a business card that reads "Tandem Autographs: More Stars than the Solar System." Though he is the son of a Chinese surgeon who died young and a Jewish mother, Alex is Smith's English Everyman, his ethnicity more matter-of-fact than life-defining. It's no big thematic issue, for instance, that one of Alex's best friends (and the brother of his girlfriend) is "black as peat," or that another has become a wisecracking rabbi. In Smith's fictional world, the purebred WASP is the dinosaur of stereotypes.

Beyond a series of fairly static set pieces, from the philosophic to the slapstick, what little narrative momentum there is concerns Alex's pursuit of a rare autograph from a reclusive and fading film star, his relationship with his girlfriend as she recovers from a car accident that happened when Alex was driving while on hallucinogens and the attempts by a group of rabbis to have him mourn his dead father with the traditional Jewish Kaddish (his father wasn't Jewish, and Alex doesn't practice). It's no surprise that the novel fails to tie such disparate strands together, for Smith is less concerned with what Alex does than with what he thinks. And what he ponders incessantly is the pursuit of the celebrity autograph.

"Autograph collecting, as Alex is not the first to observe, shares much with woman-chasing and God-fearing," writes Smith. "A woman who gives up her treasure with too much frequency is not coveted by men. Likewise a god who makes himself manifest and his laws obvious—such a god is not popular. Likewise a Ginger Rogers is not worth as much as one might imagine. This is because she signed everything she could get her hands on. She was easy. She was whorish. She gave what she had too freely. And now she is common, in the purest meaning of that word. Her value is judged accordingly."

Thus, Alex chooses to worship his inscrutable god in the form of the obscure American actress Kitty Alexander, whose signature would be worth thousands of dollars if only she ever deigned to sign. His pilgrimage eventually takes him to New York, where he teams up with a former celebrity prostitute named Honey Smith (whose notoriety echoes the Divine Brown–Hugh Grant incident and whose name suggests that of a certain novelist), who has become an autograph hound. She has a heart of gold and a germ phobia, though hating to be touched must have been a hazard in her previous occupation.

Alex has long recognized that "autographs are a small blip in the desire network." But what happens when he finds his every desire fulfilled? After spending his life feeding off celebrity, Alex becomes one, if only briefly and by association. From the other side of fame's great divide, he confirms what he had long suspected: "Groupies hate musicians. Moviegoers hate movie stars. Autograph Men hate celebrities. We love our gods. But we do not love our subjection."

In comparison with the deeper, broader truths of White Teeth, which turned Smith into a brand-name commodity, the author risks belaboring the obvious in her musings on celebrity and the ambivalence it elicits. It's as if White Teeth were such an all-encompassing triumph that she didn't want to risk repeating herself with a second novel of similar scope and scale. Smith remains a virtuosic master of voices, a stylist who can be both playful and profound, but here's hoping that the aftermath of her sophomore effort provides richer fodder for novel number three.

Don McCleese

Smith's eagerly awaited second novel begins with a bang, but rapidly loses momentum, slipping from tragicomedy to rather overdetermined farce. The introductory set piece is panoramically sock-o in the best Martin Amis tradition, taking us from Doctor Li-Jin Tandem's outing with his son's friends to see a wrestling match in Albert Hall to his sudden death from a massive stroke. Fifteen years to the week later, Li-Jin's son, Alex, is being pressed by his friends, Adams Jacobs and Joseph Klein, to say Kaddish for his dad. Alex is an autograph trader and obsessive egotist. Over the course of the week, he wrecks his car on an acid trip, goes to New York in quest of the legendary retired actress Kitty Alexander, frees her from her mad manager (who promptly announces her death to the papers, thus inflating the value of her signature) and gets his girlfriend Esther, Adam's sister, angry enough that she suspends their relationship. Smith paints portraits of a very multiculti Judaism: Adam, for instance, is a black Jew, while Alex is a disbelieving Chinese one. Adam's kabbalistic interests are supposed to operate in Smith's text the way Homer's poem operated in Ulysses, giving it a mythic dimension, but the big theme of Jewishness feels tacked on, like a marquee advertising a former attraction. Smith's pen portraits of the shabby, yobbish autograph trading circle are intermittently funny, but her prose is so busy being clever that the laughter never builds. This is disappointing but, even with its faults, the novel points to a literary talent of a high order. (Oct. 8) Forecast: Smith's second novel should sell very well on the strength of her reputation alone, though it may not be the smash hit White Teeth was. Eight-city author tour. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Smith's spectacular and sprawling first novel, White Teeth, seemed to spring from a greater reservoir of life experience than any 24-year-old author could reasonably be expected to possess, so the release of this follow-up will be closely watched for signs that Smith is a spent force. She is not: The Autograph Man is, if anything, more knowing and assured than Smith's first work. It tells the story of a young half-Chinese, half-Jewish autograph trader named Alex-Li Tandem who achieves a trade-specific form of enlightenment by tracking down the reclusive aging actress Kitty Alexander, whose extremely rare signatures are the envy of collectors everywhere. However, Alex's journey is more spiritual than commercial, shaped by the Kabbalistic guidance of a black Jewish friend and leading to a reconciliation with Alex's deceased father. But if Jewish mysticism and the collectibles market don't entice you, not to worry: the novel's real pleasure lies in the masterfully crafted characters and the small insights that capture something so true of the world that they make the reader sit up in startled recognition. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/02.]-Sean Rocha, New York Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The follow-up to Smith's smashing debut success (White Teeth, 2000, film rights recently sold to Miramax) is an uneasy mix of Sunset Boulevard, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, and James McCourt's fey romantic comedies about dementedly self-absorbed beautiful people. The arresting, promising prologue describes a day trip to London's Royal Albert Hall to attend a pro wrestling match, undertaken by 12-year-old Alex-li Tandem (son of a Jewish mother and Chinese father) and two young friends-during which Alex-li meets a younger boy passionately devoted to autograph-collecting, and loses his father, a 30ish surgeon, to a heart attack. Alas, it's all downhill thereafter, as Smith zooms ahead to focus on her protagonist at age 27; his frustrated romantic relationship with a young woman (Esther), who's also cardiacally challenged; his search for religious certainty among the arcane minutiae of Jewishness, "Goyishness," and Zen Buddhism; and his career as a collector, "verifier," and marketer (and sometime forger) of celebrity autographs. The real love of Alex-li's insular life is reclusive former screen beauty Kitty Alexander, and the quest for her rare signature takes him to conventions and auctions, misadventures with a host of walk-on weirdos (a trio of rabbis, commenting like a Borscht-Belt Jewish Greek chorus; importunate celeb-hunter Brian Duchamp, and others too numerous-and arbitrarily bizarre-to mention); and a trip to New York City to attend an Autographicana Fair, following which "the most famous whore in the world" assists his discovery of the now-moribund Kitty, living in Norma Desmond-like seclusion, guarded with Cerberus-esque ferocity by her p.r. manager Max Krause. It's even lessappetizing than such summary sounds, because all the characters are brash, opinionated cartoons, and the loose texture is repeatedly stretched to accommodate interpolated jokes, faux parables, lists, diagrams, and whatnot. Shrill, labored, and boring. Unless this is actually Smith's first novel, it's a disappointing step backward.

Kirkus Reviews