Poured Over: Zadie Smith on The Fraud

By Jenna Seery / September 5, 2023 at 6:00 am

“There’s no higher version of historical fiction to me than that, the feeling of being transported.”

Zadie Smith’s The Fraud brings all the excitement of a Victorian novel with a cast of characters that will be familiar (Charles Dickens, anyone?) and a wild web of plots that combine the best of historical fiction with themes that still resonate. Smith joins us to talk about the different process she used while writing, the importance of knowing and understanding history, freedom, resistance and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. We end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Jamie.   

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.         
  
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.      

Featured Books (Episode):
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
NW by Zadie Smith
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The New Life by Tom Crewe
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The Book of Salt by Monique Truong

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Zadie Smith needs no introduction full stop not doing it. But The Fraud. Okay, 16-year-old me was delighted when I read your New Yorker piece and you were like Dickens has to go. And 16-year-old me said thank you very, very much for taking Dickens out of an English historical novel. But Zadie, thank you so much for making the time. But would you set up this new novel because it’s really different from anything you’ve done before?

Zadie Smith

It’s quite hard to summarize. That’s what I’m learning from my first forays into trying to summarize it. It is mainly about a novelist who’s a real person. Everybody in the novel is real, more or less. William Harrison Ainsworth, who lived in my neighborhood almost 200 years ago. And he was very nice man, very convivial, had big dinner parties with lots of writers who would remember people like Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, lots of people, but he was also really, really bad. He was a terrible writer. And I remember hearing about him from my neighborhood. It was just a funny idea. Someone who was so nice, so popular, he sold so many books. He was bigger than Dickens for a while he became friends with Dickens. He was seven years older than Dickens. And I love that combination of being so nice, so popular, and so bad. And so it always amused me. And I always thought I would like to write a novel about him one day or comic novel about him. And then just in the course of reading about him, his story collided with another story I’ve been interested in for a long time, which is the story of the Tichborne Claimant. And that story is about a poor working-class man, who arrived in London from Australia. He was an English though and claimed this missing, aristocratic had been missing for about 25 years. And with him was a Black man, a servant of the family. Who had been a slave who swore that this man was the real Roger Tichborne. And that’s the way it also has interested me for years. And it turned out oddly in a coincidence, that one of the young men around William Harrison Ainsworth, when he was young, a poet, years later gave up poetry, became a lawyer and became a lawyer on the Tichborne case. So these two things I’ve been thinking about for decades really came together. And so I wrote a novel about them. See, I told you it was hard to summarize.

I don’t think it is hard to summarize, because all I can think is God, what a small world, right?

It was a small world. I think at first, I thought, Oh, this is so mystical, and crazy and and all about you Zadie, that this thing should be. When I started reading about the Victorian or more, it just was a small world. It was well, people knew each other within journalism, literary life music, it was just more. And then even recently, I’ve been reading Virginia Woolf diaries and the amount of time she’s walking to London, and just bumped into her friends by everyday dumped into an attempt into. So you just have to imagine a London which would be more like I would say, present day Rome, I’ve lived in Rome. And in Rome, it’s possible to bump into someone twice in the same day in the morning, and in the afternoon. It’s a small city, I love Rome, but it’s, you know, when they have those clocks, which say Rome, Tokyo, Paris, your Rome is delusional. Rome is a gorgeous place, but it is nothing like New York, Tokyo, Paris or London. It is a small, parochial, beautiful town. And London was like that, it was small. And you you could bump into people and you could run into them at different times in your life. So it’s not as big a coincidence as I had imagined.

Which kind of gets me to the Claimant, right, you refer to him as the Claimant throughout the book, which is a device I love, so I’m just going to stick to that. But now this dude thought he was going to pull it off when he’s operating in this very small world. Now, granted, he’s claiming to be someone who was killed in a shipwreck, but I mean, it takes a little audacity.

I mean, it is a little bit, the photographs are around, but they’re not so common. So is a photograph of the Claimant and of the real Tichborne. And I didn’t know you can convince yourself of anything. I think of that dress on the internet. You know, some people thought it was silver, some people thought it was blue and gray. Those photos are printed in the paper together their eyes, the two men had similar eyes. One was at least 300 pounds heavier than the other, but it was just possible and it definitely takes audacity. But I mean, when I was writing, I was thinking about Trump and so definitely to think you can be president when you’re a reality TV show hero and the kind of New York shyster but sometimes it’s your destiny itself, which convinces people,

The British public bought into that case, and you capture all of that energy. And Ainsworth’s wife, she’s a great character. There’s also his housekeeper, these two women, those two women.

So he had married first when he was young and had three children and his wife died. And so he was in the middle of like a very successful literary career. And I guess he thought, I need a woman in this house, I can’t carry on my life with these three small children and no woman. So he brought into his life, his cousins with and she became his housekeeper. And in my novel, his lover, and that is the only thing I cannot, I guess be certain of in the novel from reading his novels, of which there are so many over 40 There is a strong suggestion he was having an affair with his own cousin. It seems to be a recurring thing in a lot of his novels, these kinds of surreptitious sexual affairs. He’s with his cousin for about 20 years, and then, in real life, and in my novel, he married his maid. And his was like a very young woman in her 20s. She had a baby by him, and he was in his 60s, it would have been a scandal, but they kept it pretty quiet. I think she’s a working class woman, unlettered, illiterate. And it was really interesting to me, trying to imagine that marriage what it must have been like.

I mean, you’ve kind of famously said that, when you sit down to write a novel, you start at the first sentence, you finish it the last like you’re not planning, but this is wildly different from NW or Swing Time, or White Teeth, or On Beauty or The Autograph, man. I mean, this is just a whole, you’ve stumbled across two storylines. How did we get here?

You know, to me, I guess, they’re not as different as they seem. I mean, I know that stylistically different. But I have the opposite feeling sometimes that writers have obvious obsessions, and they get embarrassing as you repeat yourself over the years. So to me, they’re quite close. But definitely the way of writing it was a little bit different in that I had a true story, which was the most freeing and enjoyable thing. But otherwise, some things were similar, like, I quite often write the end first or the last page, you know, and then the challenge is to try and get there, you know, start from the beginning and get to that final point. So that was the same I wrote the last chapter in Tyre. And then the one thing which was different is I gave myself a kind of deadline, I was really interested in how Victorian novelists wrote their novels, first of all, at such speed, to a print deadline every two weeks, and reading those novels, like, I know that we have this very kind of precious way of writing novels now. Right? We take seven years, sometimes we do multiple drafts, or what people say they do. And I just thought, almost all fiction until very, very recently, until the mid 20th century was written in this straight ahead way, start at the beginning, again, and I wanted to do it again. So I had two three friends, who I imagined as my subscribers, and I just wrote, I wrote the novel like that every two weeks, just keep going forward, forward, forward. Obviously, I had the luxury Dickens didn’t have that at the end, I could go back over it and type things up. But in fact, he did that too. You know, when he when he did publish, he would get back whatever he sent to newspapers and change things and do new introductions, and he did make edits, I found doing that. I think what Victorian novel is found is that your subconscious writes a lot of it. And that that’s not a bad thing. To lie, your subconscious. free rein is, if you can dare to do it, and you’re not too embarrassed, is quite useful.

The pacing of the book is really great. And you do this thing where the chapters link, and you’re giving all of you I mean, it’s very Victorian, right? Like you’re doing the thing that you’re, every chapter has a title, everything else. So the idea that you’re doing this on a two week deadline, I’m just taking a moment to sort of think about what that looks like.

All the readings, all the thinking happened a long time ago. So the writing is, is more automatic. And I really wanted to kind of mess with the reader a little bit because I’ve been so struck by people saying it’s like a Victorian novel because of course, if you pick up real Victorian novels, the sentences are completely different. Unbelievably lengthy, very waited, the chapters are extremely dense. So I knew I didn’t want to do that. From the beginning. I thought I want to make like a post one Victorian novel, like I want it to be in tiny little chunks. I want it to be ideally it didn’t work out this way. I wanted it to be sure you know, I had this dream of like 60,000 words, but of course that dream dies every single time. So it’s 100,000 words, which is still short for me and to make it as speedy as possible and to work But with the attention span of the 21st century, I wanted to see if I could get the same density and feeling and but in these tiny sections, like I really want to see if that would work.

I just want to riff off of something you said in this piece from the New Yorker about working on The Fraud. We were like, well, you know, if you’re an English novelist, eventually you’re going to write historical even if you try not to, and you had sort of, I don’t, I can’t tell if you actively try it, or it just wasn’t going to happen until it happened. But I mean, here you are writing, historical, but also, you’ve got this great line about how isn’t it in the DNA of a novel to be new. And it’s kind of what Hilary Mantel did, right.

It annoyed me about Hillary, not that she, I mean, I was such a huge fan of Hillary’s years, when everybody, as far as I was concerned, was ignoring her, like I had a great head of rage about Hillary Mantel for a long time. This was a woman I considered to be a genius of the first order. And yet, all the men of her generation or who I also admire a great deal, but it would just blow my mind that sometimes they’d never heard of her or and I knew her redistrict was tiny, and she’d written 12 Amazing, contemporary novels that I just couldn’t understand why people weren’t reading them. And then Beyond black happened, right? It wasn’t until she sat down to write this historical novels that everybody paid attention. And that really bugged me that, you know, in England, you can be such a startling and original talent. But until you’ve historical novels, you can’t get them to pay attention. So I didn’t read those historical novels for years. And I didn’t read them once I started writing this book, because they didn’t look so scared because I knew how great it was. And I didn’t want to scare myself. So the first thing I did when I finished this novel was pick up more for me in a spoiler, it’s, it’s incredible. I knew it would be, but I also knew there would be something radical about it. And it is radical, it isn’t at all. It is beaten in style or mode. It’s very curious that novel, it’s written in a very strange voice, that I don’t have any language for it, kind of in the present tense, kind of in his consciousness, but it’s, it’s very Hillary, and it’s very much of the body, like it’s completely aware of what it was physically like to live in this extreme moment. So it didn’t disappoint me at all. But I still hope, you know, for younger novelists that this is not the pathway that every young novelist thinking has to go down, like to be ignored for 25 years, and then and then write a novel and get some attention. So that hasn’t been my situation. Obviously, I was lucky in ways that Hillary wasn’t when she was young. So I come to historical novel from a slightly different place. But you’re also always wary of the part of it that feeds into great nostalgia in England. So I guess once I wrote it, one other thing I said to myself was, I don’t want to see it on. Sounds crazy to say, but I didn’t want it to be on like school list. I want it to be I want something about it to be unsuitable, not safe for the office. But once I started writing it, I wanted to make it not cozy because I didn’t find the Victorian period cozy. I think they were interesting people, radical people very surprising. very perverse. So I wanted to keep all of the in the novel. And so, of course, I’m happy if young people read it, but but I don’t want it to be cozy in that way.

Yeah, The Fraud felt really sort of wildly modern to me as I was reading it. And it’s partially the characters because yes, I get that they’re Victorians. But it’s exactly what you’re saying. Like Victorians were weirdos, and really wounded. Yeah. And I think we lose sight of that really quickly. Because also, we don’t really teach the sport like we don’t teach the actual history of sin of the Victorian era. So we’re all just thinking everyone’s swarming around and funny clothes, right with funny accents, eating funny food. And that’s kind of how we look at the whole thing. But you were saying this earlier in the show that you see the connection between all of the novels. And when I was reading the fraud. All I could think was, of course, this is how we get to all of the earlier books, because this is England. And this is how you get the culture that you’re writing about whether it’s, you know, the 90s, or the early aughts, or, you know, NWA was technically I mean, you set that contemporary right again, 12. And it was supposed to be present day. So like, that’s how we get to all of those places. That’s how we get to the language like the continuum is, is absolutely there. I’m still just kind of giggling over the fact that here you are doing this thing that makes perfect sense. Like you grew up writing these novels, you said even that the English novel change your trajectory,

right? I think it’s such a deep part of my life, English literature, but I’ve also always had questions, but I’m not someone who is usually quick to anger. But I have to say when I was researching this novel, the absence in my education made me angry. The more I because I, I guess, but until then, I mean, I went to a very, what you would call like a big rough public school. So the holes of my education are many because it was a struggling school and there wasn’t a lot of money and there were 2000 kids in it. But this is something different, because like my kids are in a similar schools right now. And you have, you know, these great efforts in what they call Black History Month and all the rest of it. But to me, that concept, Black History Month falls so far short of what I consider to be history, that it’s almost, besides the point like I really couldn’t believe reading about the Victorian period that I hadn’t learned about the relationship between England, Jamaica, because without exaggeration, that is 19th century history, right? You have to go out of your way. Like you really have to go round the houses to avoid that topic. It’s not a side issue. Noticing that really struck me island to island is another amazing example. My husband is Irish, if you grew up in England, in the schools, and you’re not learning about Ireland in 19th century, that is ideological, an effort has been made. And so it really, it really struck me because I guess when I was growing up, I did think of my education, of course, because it was free and being given to me as basically benign at some level. And to see this extraordinary absence of information. While by the way, we’re very busy learning, at least in my school about American slavery. Right? We got lots of information about that, I can give you chapter and verse about what’s going on in Mississippi. So I really saw it as a deliberate absence. And that began to really annoy me. And so writing the book was very kind of educational and healing, both when I think about me, and my husband is like, working class subjects of England in two different places. It was just incredibly educational. Like I really was educated writing this book. So it was a it was a good thing.

Yeah. And I grew up in New England, where people really have an anglophilia that is kind of wild, like we are the home.

For a while I remember. Yeah, it’s wild.

It’s completely wild. I’m like, you know, we had a revolution, right.

I’m also deeply fond of England, but but I can’t be fond of a falsified version of it. If I live somewhere, and I’m from somewhere, I like to know everything about it, it to me, it doesn’t, it’s not a matter of loving it less or more. It’s just interesting. And I think every people needs to know their own history in full. It’s just a matter of human dignity. I felt coming out of this book, a sense of my own kind of personal dignity. It’s embarrassing not to look,

But I think too, I mean, especially when I look at, I’ll use American history, obviously, as an example. It’s like how messy our history is, and the stories we tell ourselves about our history, and the different pieces of it. And you’re just like, hi, there are actually multiple versions. And several of those, you know, never get taught, as it were, I mean, but with the fraud, I mean, part of what I appreciated about it, is the sense of sort of, with good historical fiction, the sense of time travel, right is pretty significant that you can step outside of the world, but you can still see the framework for where we are now, if you’re looking closely enough.

I mean, the most magical example of that I didn’t get close to it. One day, maybe when I’m older, there’s a book called The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. That book is time travel. Like I don’t know how else to describe it, you feel like you are in 18th century Germany, or as close as you can ever imagine being there. And it’s not because the language is 18th century German, or flowery in some way. Or it’s just, there’s almost no metaphors, no similes, you’re just there. It’s complete clarity. I thought that is the dream, that you’re you just put people there, because you want to put them there and that they feel they’re there. And there’s no higher version of historical fiction to me than that the feeling of being transported.

Part of that being transported to though is you’ve always talked about how a writer should have a sense of urgency when they’re creating whatever it is, right? Like you don’t separate essays from fiction and what have you. But what’s the urgency behind a novel like The Fraud? I mean, is it really just making sure that the truth gets told and the history gets told them that we understand what it like is that it’s thing that’s driving this.

You know, I spend my days in the contemporary moment with everybody else, hearing versions of the past, which to me are sober now. And so flat. I just really noticed this tendency, both online and with people I spoke to the idea that people of the past are like, half blind, old timey versions of us I’m affected. Versus. Yeah, I couldn’t understand about that is that two things have been said simultaneously. We’re the Perfected version. Okay. And also, this is a trash fire reality of awfulness. I was trying to understand how can both things be true in people’s mind, we’re the best version of people that there’s ever been. Reality is a trash fire. To me, it was like this strange contradiction in the way people spoke about the present. So I really want to understand why they thought people of the past was so pathetic and so flat compared to themselves, and also why they felt this to me, perfectly near liberal idea that the past only gets worse, and we only get better. And the truth and justice are always with us. That concept I really was fascinated by so I realized you could only think of one way about the past, if you don’t know it. You can only Oh, that’s my phone woman. Looking back at Victorian marriages, I talk to people I realized they thought that Victorian marriages with these kinds of Puritan affairs, blessed by God, like when you actually read about Victorian marriages, the first thing that becomes clear is there’s about three people in each marriage. Usually way more, many people have two families, many people have secret children, like polyamory was not invented in 2016. This has been going on for a very long time, people have been trying to find solutions to the domestic since there has been the domestic so that was, I guess what really, really struck me is that one of the things we get as time goes by is a language for things. But that doesn’t mean that things are suddenly created by language, things have always existed. I just read Tom Crewe’s, wonderful book, The New Life.

I was gonna ask you if you’d read that, because I felt like a beautiful companion piece.

I don’t know, Tom Crewe, I’ve never met him. But here’s an example of when novelists are working in tandem, they didn’t even know they are. So he’s working in a period where we’re just beginning to get the words for feelings we’ve had since the beginning of time. And I’m working in a period where those feelings are still there. But there’s no language yet. He’s working at exactly the moment where there’s not only language, but after language comes law, you can actually do things in the law when there’s no language, as of course, for lesbian community. In England, there was no language, there was no law. So there’s no community that doesn’t exist in the public amount. He’s dealing at the moment where that changes. So I was just fascinated by the idea of the mistaken I think, contemporary conception that is only with language that these things come into being. And as masters of contemporary language, we must be masters of concept. But that’s, of course not the case. These ideas have always existed, that language doesn’t always appear for them. That’s another matter. But people have always had these feelings wherever they were feelings for freedom, feelings of sexual interest, or perversion, or dominance. These things are eternal. How we deal with them is how our history changes.

Well, in the idea to I mean, the way the public responds, and I am going to step away from Tom’s novel for a second only because, one, it’s great, but I could keep going on that. It’s so so good. If you haven’t read The New Life, just go get it. But the way too, that language shapes both Eliza’s understanding of the world and Sarah’s the wife, right, like the way they respond to the court case, the way they respond to Andrew, who is a slave from Jamaica, who becomes a household staff member and keeps insisting that the claimant is in fact, who he says he is. And just watching how the three of those characters use language to understand where they are in the world. And where this case, it’s really smart. And it moves, it moves the way that NW does, right? Like the language there for me, kept swinging and swinging and swinging. And I it really, I’m very fond of NW. So I keep coming back to it. It’s just because I really love that book. But again, what you’re doing with language is wild.

I went that’s another thing which felt urgent to me that the one of the problems with the past, I guess, since 2008, since the real explosion of Silicon Valley is that that is an American phenomenon. It’s an American algorithm, and it has spread throughout the world. One of the things it’s done, it’s a kind of American colonialization of consciousness is everywhere in America. And that I really chafe against, not because I think there’s any better or worse in America, but it is different. And the assistance on its difference is part of what I wanted to do in this novel. And already I’ve been struck by giving it to people, particularly younger people, some of the things they’re amazed by in it are things that men Shoebridge people would be amazed to, but for instance, they don’t understand why is Bogle in court for two years giving testimony? Because in American world, no black man could stand in a court and give testimony like that in 1873. So the lesson from that is not Oh, England was so much more progressive, but it is that we did not have racialized laws in the same way. It’s important to know that because these differences have normal ramifications in our history. And if you think everywhere is America, you’re going to miss understand a lot of history that you see, across Europe, in Africa itself in India, these are not the same country and something about American narcissism, about itself and about its own history creates a flat earth for everybody else. And I think the rest of the world really wants to insist on its separate identity, you know, we are not you have different ideas. We’ve had different histories. And that is important. So to me finding these facts, all I want to do is put them there, just to remind people, that things moved in different ways, in different places, created different kinds of people, different consciousness and different histories. So a lot of what I think people find surprising in the book, it’s nothing to do with me, it’s just that it goes into an absence that has been kind of flooded by American knowledge, American ideas and American algorithms.

Yeah, that American the new American colonialism that is a really, I’m going to steal that phrase. I’m sorry. It’s just that’s exactly what those algorithms are. And especially when you look around America’s legacy, not just in Africa, but also in Asia. Like, there’s a footprint there that I think not everyone is fully versed in.

Right. It’s those things, all of us under your heel, to be reeducated in this very particular way. So I find it quite freeing to be back in the past and remembering that Jamaica, is Jamaica, that England is England that their relationship is incredibly brutal, over so many centuries, is a particular relationship that I want to think about, particularly separately from the American one.

Yeah, you’d written an article, I think, for The Guardian about the book, Black England, right. And the author in that talks about how the past is basically an entirely separate country, like the way we think about place, the way we think about time. You know, novels are the perfect place to play with all of those ideas, right? Obviously, you’re you do it with every book,

And to give up your feeling of superiority over the past, like that feeling to me is has no political content. The political content of a novel like this, to me is true. It’s not just how on earth did a country population ever live on top of such utter misery as Jamaican slavery, and go about its day without paying any attention to it? How who were these people? And how evil were they? That’s an idea without political content. What is more political to me is to think, are there situations right now in which we also sit upon bottomless misery, economic desperation, and even slavery? As in the Muslims right now? Yeah, we’re going about it? And the answer is, yes. These people are not unimaginable to us. When you say they’re unimaginable. You’re saying, I can’t conceive of myself in that position. But if you’re wearing a t shirt from H&M, if you’ve got an iPhone in your hand, you are in that position, you are profiting off the misery of millions. We all are myself included. So that, to me is a physical thought.

Again, this comes back to why I kept feeling like this novel was so modern as I was reading The Fraud. And again, yes, the language isn’t particularly Victorian, right? But you just you create this world. And I’m so caught up in these characters, and you’re bouncing back and forth between London and Jamaica. And also, while I’m reading it, though, I’m thinking of this play that you have done, which I saw it BAM. Last spring, The Wife of Willesden and Willesden is a big piece of The Fraud. It’s been a big hit, obviously, NW and Swing Time, and White Teeth and everything, but talking about place, right, like you lived there for the first 30 years. And then you left and now you’re back. Where does place fit into it? Where does Willesden specifically fit into how you can write about what you write about?

Um, I never thought it would be like this. I knew writers like this, like this occupation with place. I didn’t think it would be me. It’s been a surprise to me. Okay. I do know like when I see with my brothers who used to be rappers that there is certainly something about the class we’re from that your hood, your landscape is, seems to have significance to you. It does seem to me the richer you are, the less your locality matters, right? That is the very kind of context of money really is that it moves and you move like a kind of free moving node of capital. It doesn’t really matter where you are. It nothing really belongs to you in that sense. The further you go down the social scale, people obsess about the neighborhood’s, they’ll kill for them. Because the streets of all you have and that’s what hip hop is. is about basically about the fact that streets are yours, you’ve got nothing else. But this block. And I’m very far from, you know, that kind of extreme deprivation that you see in I don’t know, like British grime, for example. I think I grew up in a neighborhood where the neighborhood mattered, and I think it might have for my brothers in their music, and it’s, it’s mattered in my writing. I’m also just incredibly fortunate that it happens at the bar I was born into is the most interesting. So interesting. Interesting. It’s interesting, historically, it’s interesting. It’s people. Often when I’m walking down, Calvin Harris, my husband, he’ll say, because he comes from, you know, a monoculture. He comes from Ireland, you cannot believe how many different people are on the street. Like if you froze them at two o’clock in the afternoon and asked each person, where are your people from? You get 120 answers. It’s like queens. It’s the same scenario. And people from Queens that I’ve met, are obsessed with Queens, and you go load TV shows are obsessed with Queens and music from quick. It’s like that. It’s just endlessly interesting. It’s hard to be bored by

Queens sometimes feels like it has its own accent.

And my party trick in England. If I’m doing a reading and assigning cue someone, I like to think I can tell the difference between North and South London every single time.

Yeah, yeah, actually, North and South London just made me think Caleb Azumah Nelson, loves NW. I love. He loves NW the way I love NW. And it was just, it was so much fun talking to him about how that book helped him create Open Water, and then Small Worlds, which are two of my favorites, I mean, Small Worlds is really…

Nice, right? And sometimes we remember though, we’ve had dinner in the middle of the city, but he doesn’t seem to come North. And I know, I don’t go south. So it’s gonna be a friendship just at the river. And on email, God bless him.

But hey, can we talk about the influence of American editors on your work? Because you’ve, you’ve said this a couple of times. And I think this is really kind of fascinating, that you’ve said your writing has actually gotten sharper, because of multiple edits, because of the process because of, you know, being able to sort of strip it down. And you know, I don’t always think of you as a super stripped down writer, but I know like, even if I’m reading you in the New York Review of Books, right, which will give you more space than most places, right? I’m just gonna fly through that piece.

I think I’ve just I feel like I’ve been talking about America and this book. And I need to now rewind and say, without America, I really would not be the writer I am. Literary system, that particularly literary journalism is of such a high standard, that you all should pat yourselves on the back. I mean, you do quite often, to be honest.

We really do.

It’s just completely different. It’s a different tradition. So in England, we have Grub Street and Grub Street, the point is, write the piece, the day before it is published, make the biggest headline make the biggest first reveal the scandal make the argument and English newspapers still work like that if if I get asked to write for English paper on Tuesday, they’re going to publish it on Wednesday. Whereas if we’re if I’m asked to write something in America, I’ve got six months, you know, a lot of time, and it’s a lot of work and a lot of editing, and it goes back and forth. The thing I think it taught me most of all is never to be humiliated, or angry or obstructionist about edits, because someone is trying to help you make less of a fool of yourself. That’s never a bad thing. And New York review with Bob particularly, he just did it in such a restrained way. He would just be a little note saying we don’t use this word, because we find it. And then I’d look at the word and think, you know what that word is meaningless. People say all the time, you know, if you’re overusing the word neoliberal, or, you know, just what do you actually mean? What do you what do you actually mean by that word? That was his point. It wasn’t ever to sometimes I’d argue with them. I said, Well, that’s a political word, and I need to use it in its political context each show, but it’s overused is another word, say, Can you be more precise? At that habit was really important to me. And so I like White Teeth and everything, but the kind of rambling, you know, six ways to try and say one thing. I was really cured of that in America.

Okay. Well, also, I mean, you were what? 21 when you started that book, you were one of his public. I mean, I loved that book when it came out. Certainly, I mean, especially as a biracial woman, I was like, What is this? Who is this person? I’ve never heard? This is great. Energy is very good. Yeah. I mean, it’s the kind of thing where you can pass it on to a young person and this is not

That’s what I mean by that teenagers. That’s my favorite. But I am also on the side of, you know, adult reading because I am an adult. I like to read things by adults and I like to support the idea that adult writing can exist. So for me, white teeth is a teenager’s book written by someone, much more than teenager. And it’s, it’s lovely for that. But I personally find this principle of trying to say what you want to say, with the least words possible, to be an important principle,

Precision matters, like precision really matters. And I think the writers I most appreciate, are also writers who read a ton. And they read a crawl, you know, the reading informs the writing, right? Like, that’s, that’s what all of this is.

the more variety is what helps. So, you know, I spent so long in the 19th century, recently, when I finished the hunger for new things, debut novels, anybody thinking differently about anything is very strong in me, you know, I really like to know what’s going on. And what’s good. Someone can tell me that novel is new and young and radical. But if I pick it up, and it’s badly written, and, you know, repetitive, and then I’m, I’m done. I don’t you know, and the same goes for, I can be told that somebody is, you know, in their 70s, and couldn’t possibly write a good, but then the book might surprise you, like, I’m always I’ve learned to be open, and I very much dread the kind of middle aged novelist who can’t bear to read new things. Yeah, definitely.

I also need great sentences.

Yeah, you have to be able to write so I really began to feel sometimes when I was in New York, you meet young writers, they try and argue into the idea that the book they just written was like, you can’t you can’t argue it’s not a matter of like, arguing. There’s just me in the novel by myself, my room, you’re not? Can’t sell it to me. You can’t. You can I mean, you can have said it to me, but in the end, it’s a very intimate thing between the reader and and the page.

Yeah, it is. And readers always going to bring their own experience to whatever they’re reading. But, you know, especially for something like The Fraud, right, like some of Britain’s history, right, but obviously schooled here, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. I didn’t feel like I didn’t have all of the parts, right, because I had the characters, I had the language, I had the movement of the story. And I was laughing a lot because novel by you, I mean, obviously, you’re not going to leave out the funny bits. But I didn’t feel lost. At any point, I was just like, Okay, I’m just going to hand myself over. Because this is a novel by Zadie Smith.

I always felt that as a kid that there was some levels that I was blocked from in some way, or that you prior knowledge and mine that in the novel, it’s always the case that there’ll be lots of different levels of reading readers taking lots of different things from it, I personally always want to leave the door open, so that somebody can walk through. And also, with the existence of the internet, the most beautiful thing about the internet is that your reader is a cyborg, your reader can go and find out whatever they want, they can Google at any moment. So the door is really wide open, you just have to kind of nudge it and say, Look at this, look at that, if they want to find out about the lady Blessington, or the real trial, they can do all of those things, they can see pictures of everybody, I don’t need to spend too much time telling you what these people look like, if you want to find out you can find out the novel can be many different things, depending on your interest, you know, and that I like to give that freedom.

So can I go back for a second for something a piece you wrote years ago in the New York Review where you’re saying, In Defense of fiction, right, right. Like you’re not arguing that fiction needs to do it. But do we know what the novel used to be? Like? Can we just lay that ground for a second? Because I think there’s so many times where I see people coming to the novel in a way where I’m like, well, you’re kind of missing a little bit, right? Like, it’s a way to play with time.

Sometimes I would say exactly when I was in New York, it means sometimes writers and think if you hate them over this much as a form, you have to write them. You could do something else, like no one’s got a gun to your head, you could maybe just, if you’re so filled with contempt for this form, then, you know, don’t sweat it, there’s like, there’s other things to do. But at the same time, the novel to me does have to move and change. People do have to come and break it. They have to do new things with it. But some of those new things can sometimes be about reaching back like when I was writing this, I really personally for my own sanity, wanted to remind myself that I am capable of reading that I am a human being whose mind can hold more than one thought at the same time. Who can follow different threads of things, who can time moving, who can remember how memory works, and it doesn’t go from A to Z and a simple way that it moves about. I am a grown up that basically that I am a grown up. I wanted to write books for grownups remember that I’m a grown up. Remember that I can read things. Yeah. This is not Ulysses. It’s not even Mrs. Dalloway, and people were able to buy these, like little penguin, you know, cheap novels and deal with quite complicated ideas. I want to know that I can still do that I can still read, and other people can still read, and that we haven’t completely been flattened or debased by our daily reading habits, because the fact is, we’re reading more than any humans have ever read in the history of the world. What are we reading, we’re reading that phone day and night, sometimes from the moment we wake up. And just like everybody else, like, I don’t have the phone, but I’m reading on my laptop and I open the article, and my eyes are jumping down the page, I get the headline and look at the photograph. I can’t concentrate. I’m not reading that thing properly. And then when I turned to the novels, I’m like, Oh, my God, what do you what do you want from me? novelists. And then I remember this person wants has respect for my brain, the way that Elon Musk and the others had no respect for me, none. Just a complete shill, they just have no respect for me as a human being with this other person who might be long dead really thinks I’m capable of this act. Breathing. It’s respect. They respect me. So I want to do that. For readers, I want to say you can do this, you can read used to be able to and I know you can, again,

I have this thing about, you know, you can read a short story while you’re standing on line waiting for something like if you’re scrolling your phone, you could read a short story.

Also, you could just like stare in space is what I do. I get a lot out of it. Like most of my day is spent just standing around looking at things. I’m just looking at things all the time. And I used to be in a world where I was doing that with other people. Now I’m alone. At this point in my life, I now actually consider it a stupid claim responsibility. Like if I’m going to be one of the few people who’s like looking at things, then it’s kind of my duty to like, carry on writing.

Does that mean we get more stories and more essays? Because I kind of really enjoy those as well.

Yeah, I love I mean, I love writing the essays, I do sometimes have the slightly sad feeling that I do if I’m assaulting myself or other people, but I like my essays. I don’t think they’re that great. I think what’s happening is that in the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is king. I really think that is what’s happening. I think we’re spending so much time reading these very, very flat force things that any essay is even like basics. But if I was writing the same essays, and this was 1997, I don’t think they’d be of interest to anyone. I think it just be an essay. So just some literary essays, I hear the fine. I think it’s just a it’s a sign of where we are. But it seems like they’re complicated or interesting. They’re not that complicated. And they’re not that interesting. They’re just written. I spent a while. Remember what writing looks like?

Honestly, I just always think they’re fun, because I’m kind of curious where your brain is gonna go. Because I don’t think you write the same thing over again. I’m like, Okay, I’ll read this.

Pick up one thing pick up. This was this used to be what an essay was? Right? Yeah. No, that’s just like, you know, I have an idea about our, our screening for, it’s just the essay and, and I was trained to write them. And so once I went to college with and, like, we were trained to write that way. It’s just, it’s just what essay writing is, I just think in the present context, because I’m not super online, so I’m not always aware of what’s going on. I’m still in like, 97 better, for worse. And it just perhaps looks peculiar if you’re in 2023.

You know, it’s funny when I think about it, though, like the way literature ages, right? You said you’d read all those a bunch of novels by Ainsworth and I can think of many things I would rather do than read sort of popular fiction from certain period. Like, there’s just some stuff where I’m like, No, can’t do it. The way we think of literature sort of being this timeless thing that sort of, you know, is held over us and it’s like, well, actually, no, it’s a response to the moment. Yeah, always the response to the moment sometimes it carries on, because the details are there and you’re like, oh my god, this is wildly modern, or this is really interesting, or like, Virginia Woolf perfect example. Like if you think about how radical her sentences were, at first, and now it’s like, oh, yeah, my mom read, Virginia Woolf. I mean, I happen to love her.

Like I just read Mrs. Dalloway. And what survives of Mrs. Dalloway is the character itself the personalities of the people and the landscapes but there’s so much news in Mrs. Dalloway. There’s like actual new He’s dating stuff he was putting in, that stuff is illegible. But I was lucky to be given a annotated version, which someone just published says endless footnotes. And, but it’s not pleasant to read that way, like you have to keep stopping. But it reminded me that when you’re putting the contemporary in that shallow way, and the level of just facts about what’s going on, and as the prime minister will do, it becomes utterly illegible, and legible really quickly. It doesn’t matter. Like you don’t know, maybe you’re not writing for posterity. I don’t even know what the point is really of reading for posterity, because you never know what’s going to be lost. But certain kinds of novels become if you literally can’t read them, it’s it’s really fascinating. Can’t tell where they were coming from and why. And, and that’s most true in extreme political moments. So to me, often, when you read the fiction of the late 60s, early 70s, illegible like, you have no idea. And I think so much of what has been written in the past, including my novels, I’m sure, pre very, very hard to comprehend in 15 to 20 years, because there was so of the moment that it really becomes hard to conceive.

Yeah, speaking of Mrs. Dalloway, I just bought a new edition of The Hours that’s bound into a single volume with Mrs. Dalloway. So reading the two in quick succession, which I haven’t done in a really long time, but it was really quite satisfying. And The Wife of Willesden is available in that same like, you have the actual text of The Wife of Bath with your play the idea that that as an object, right, like I just interviewed someone recently, it was Ann Patchett, actually, and Our Town factors really heavily in the new novel. And it’s like, I haven’t read Our Town since I was a teenager. It’s really interesting to see how modern that because I remember thinking, you’re pulling my teeth, like why I have no great love for great expectations, either. You know, I love books. I do. I love story. I love books, I love voice. But there are certain things where I just have very visceral memories of someone trying to feed me my cultural vegetables and thinking, but why do I need to care? Like, I know, you’re telling me this is canon. But why do I need to care? And no one? Like history teachers kind of got that piece a little faster. But I felt like some of my literature teachers were like, No, you just have to care.

And you don’t know this, some things will never go down. Like I can’t hope that they will come. But for me, Proust is not something that I can do. I know that sometimes you say that to people, and they look at you like you’ve just, you know, killed the child. He says ability and mind do not, there’s something that doesn’t function. So sometimes you just, you know, 20 years of trying, you just think we’re between me and you. There will be no accommodation. Other times like I had it with, you suddenly something clicks new, you get it for the first time in your life. It just depends.

Yeah, I have a Lydia Davis translation of the first volume of Proust that I swore I was going to read during lockdown. She might be the answer. I’ve thought about that. But, I started it, and I will go back to it. But I would also really like to have time to reread a little Balzac, a little Flaubert like that sort of, if I’m gonna go there, like, those are the guys I want. Or, you know, going back to Hillary Mantel for a second A Place of Greater Safety. Like she made me care about the French Revolution in ways that no one had ever been able to get me to care about the French Revolution before. And I love those characters.

Like I read a lot of Morrison again, recently. I read those novels as a child, they’re just completely different as an adult, like it’s a transformative thing. But there’s something about I mean, reading Morrison really struck me that when you know what you’re about. She knew what she was about. Yeah, totally doesn’t matter how far the times change the heart and authenticity of those books phase. It’s hard to describe it even when all facts or political arguments may have transformed, even the ones about race are not the same. Like they can transform around you. And yet, the books stays, and maybe that’s just a great, that’s just great writing.

I think it’s partially great writing, but I think Toni Morrison is also the kind of person that you get very rarely in the culture.

Unwavering, like just not at all interested in the currents. She just had a project. And that was the end of the day doesn’t matter. She began it and she finished it and that she was just not to be distracted.

What do you think happens next for you now that you’ve finally written the historical that you really were not planning on writing?

Well, for me, it’s more than that. Finally writing a novel that satisfies me. It’s, it’s what I meant to write and I wrote it, so that even if everybody else hates it, it doesn’t. It’s a big deal for me personally, because I don’t have to have regrets and apart from it being a bit longer than it is basically the novel I went to write and it relieves me of a lot of childhood confusion, things I never understood that that where I’m from where my family is from, what Jamaica means to me, what England means to me. I just got out from under it in a way that I find quite freeing. I don’t know why I have two novels in my book completely different things. But I would really like to give myself a break, I would really like to not write for a bit, but I just don’t know if that’s a viable option for me, basically. But I would love just to not do anything for a little bit.

You could read a lot. You can read other people’s stuff.

That’s it, but I am. So every day now. It’s just feels incredible. Like I can wake up and read and that job, and it’s very hard for me to as always been given to myself, it’s okay just to read for a bit. I taught for so many years, because it was a way of legitimizing. I could say, even to my dead father, see, I’ve got a job, I’ve got a job. But my father is quite long dead now. And I have to say to myself, This is my job, my real job. No, it is not a coal mine with my phone thought a real job was, but it is my job. And part of it is reading.

Yeah. And I think if you’re gonna hold a mirror up to us, you know, whoever we are, wherever we are, you need the context. I’ve seen more work recently where the context is kind of missing, or it’s hard for people to place a larger context. I mean, this goes back to criticism, right? Like, there’s some criticism, you’ve seen where I’m like, that’s a summary of the book, right? You just told me everything I need to know, that happens between page one and whatever the last page is, but you’re not giving me the context for the world that this book exists within. And that’s the thing that I, I miss more than anything, honestly, when I’m reading criticism today is just kind of like where’s the rest of it?

That’s part of a larger problem, which to me is about resistance. It’s called resistance. But it’s also like existential. And one, right? I have to resist personally, is the feeling of being in an eternal present, which I find, I mean, I’m not very online, but I’m playing online. And when I’m online, I feel that the whole machine is to make me feel that there was nothing but now, that is how the algorithm works. That is how it works. When I get emails from young people whose job is in publishing, and they email me at three in the morning, whatever, I know that they are trapped in a system that is unjust, it is unjust. And it’s not a time to do any work. You are not stuck in an internal present, you have time, time exists, we have our own time, we have intimate time, work time, they don’t own us, they don’t own every minute of us space, as a part of it is resistance thing. And that the beautiful books about this Jenny Odell’s books are so brilliant, your time, the time where there is no time and come home from work and then email till three in the morning, that is not human time. That is the time of capital, that is not my time, and needs to stop. And part of it. That resistance is also saying 2023 is not the only year there is also 1815 1723 exists, it is real, it is separate from the present, that’s also resistance. And one of the most beautiful things about doing this book was like following these working class, leftist movements back 200 years and thinking, Well, how did they work? Because they did work? How did we get the vote not just for working men, but finally, for women, and also for Black people? And how did that happen? How were slaves? I want to say freed because it’s not you can’t free another man, people are always free. But how does slavery end? How did that legally happen? How did these movements work? And one of the things about being caught in an eternal present is you never get to learn that. And the truth is really interesting. The truth is, those things happen by mass movements, mass movements of solidarity between people who had almost nothing in common, but came together to make these things happen. So that to me is like a vital lesson. I knew it kind of intellectually, but reading for this book, reminded me of it emotionally. What the abolitionists did, what state did themselves, what Parliament did, what working people did, what the boycotts did, that was a mass movement that took 200 years. So there’s good, I guess, good and sad news in there. But it’s practical news, it’s like better than thinking, what they’re trying to tell you, which is, it’s a hashtag that will do that won’t do.

The emotion lasts a lot longer than a hashtag, right? The emotion of the experience the emotion of reading this book and connecting with the characters. You know, I knew this was gonna happen. I knew we were gonna go roaming around the entire sort of catalogue of your work, but Eliza is an amazing character, and I love her name. It’s a little too Dickensian, but that was her real name. That was her real name, but she feels again, I know I’ve said this a couple of times in the show, really modern, really modern and she has a big arc. And so before I let you go, can we just spend some time with her?

I was thinking a lot about frustration. It really feels frustrated, women perhaps often feel particularly frustrated, or say that they do. Sometimes under a lot of different commitments. I’m always complaining, you know, not having enough time. And I’ve got too many things to do. And I’ve got too many rules. And when I went back to think about lies and thought, by how many magnitudes more frustrated, must you be, without the vote without access to express yourself without a career without any means of fulfilling her interest, or, you know, the frustration is overwhelming. So that interested me and also, one of the things I found most challenging about contemporary moment is what I understand young people to be saying, which really interested me is that there is no hierarchy of freedoms. So I grew up in a generation where you, subconsciously, I realized, I believe that there is a tidy order to liberation. So first, then the women, then the Blacks. It’s not something anyone ever says to you. But subconsciously, when you reading the history, you come to believe that this is an orderly series of events. And now, you know, homosexuals. And now, as if that’s just and what I understood from the moment is that there is an idea that there is no timeline to freedom. This is there’s only a radical reversal, everybody is free. And there was no waiting. No waiting should happen. Freedom is an absolute thing. And I thought, as much as people of my generation sometimes roll their eyes at the ahistorical nature of that demand, in terms of justice is absolutely correct. They’re absolutely correct. There is no order to freedom. So when I came back to Eliza, I thought, she’s living in a time where you’re constantly be told to wait, the slaves are being told to wait, you’re not ready for freedom yet. So you’re said women have been told to wait you’re not ready for freedom yet. You need education, you need time and working class men are being told not yet. The Irish are being told not yet. So she became the vehicle for all that frustration. What would it be like to know that you are free, you are born free. Your freedom is a sacred part of your existence, and yet constantly be told, not now. Not now. To me. She’s a woman of a 19th century but that frustration is common. Everybody who’s ever felt themselves oppressed or unfree, knows that feeling of I refuse to weigh and the argument she has with Henry, who is another character in the book, a kind of young, mixed race radical, exactly about that. And it’s an unresolved argument, because to me, it’s unresolved in me, like, I know that freedom is absolute and immediate. And I also know that Freedom doesn’t come without historical processes. The two things are true simultaneously. So when I was writing the novel, those two ideas were in my mind always that this is an absolute, I’m as free as a day I was born. Freedom is mine, no one can give it to me. That same time, in practical terms, you have to fight for it.

I cannot wait for readers to meet Eliza. I think The Fraud is one of the best books I’ve read in recent memory. And not just because I’m sharing a screen with you, it is really a big, important gorgeous, fun, amazing, amazing, amazing book. And it just it fills in, I think a lot of gaps for people. But you know, it’s possible to just really enjoy a story that’s making a lot of points at the same time.

You don’t need to like, I thought a lot about the philosophy and politics of it. But the bottom line is a novel is about people. Yeah, only thing you need is to know and love Eliza. She’s very irritating sometimes. But I love her, when I finished this novel, I miss spending time with her. And I that’s all I can hope for from readers.

Yeah, I envy all the people who are about to read this book for the first time. I really, I envy them because it was just it was a blast this book. Zadie Smith, thank you so much. The Fraud is out now, everything else is out in paperback. And if you haven’t read the other stuff, go get that too.