NW by Zadie Smith: book review
Overview: This is a book about a neighborhood more than a single character. The novel opens with Leah in her mid-thirties grappling with whether she'll give into the societal pressure to have children and becoming obsessed with the woman who robbed her. A news bulletin Leah notices at a party bleeds into the next section where the victim of the crime's story unfolds in the last few days of his life. Then we shift back to the origin story of Natalie, Leah's lifelong best friend. We trace Natalie's life from growing up in the estate to university to being married with children and realize Natalie's life isn't as perfect as it seems. Through the lens of Leah, Natalie, Felix, and others who grew up around them, the book takes a more expansive look at the NW. Overall: 4
Characters: 4 Leah is the daughter of Irish immigrants. She never had Natalie's drive, but she did have a sense of self preservation. She fumbled through her philosophy degree, eventually got a job with the council, and married a hairdresser who resembled her childhood crush. When the story begins, Leah is being ridiculed by her family and friends for falling for a scam. But Leah becomes obsessed with the girl who stole her money, spiraling over how their lives started in somewhat similar places and diverged so greatly. At the same time, Leah is dealing with the pressure of her husband and family expecting her to have kids when she deeply does not want to but can't bring herself to voice it.
Natalie, who was called Keisha as a child, found that patterns and memorization came easily to her in school. She was the star of her class and managed to leave the estate to go to university to be a lawyer. She fought hard to build the life she wanted and married young to a much wealthier man. While they were quite infatuated with each other's minds in school, they don't know how to face the longterm friction of their very different socioeconomic upbringing. Natalie struggles with having worked to conform to other's expectations for so long that she doesn't know herself, and that becomes a greater problem for her with time.
The rest of the book is populated with the people who they've grown up with, other kids in their classes who never left and the adults who have now become older and more frail who defined their view of the world. Their husbands offer an interesting contrast to both Leah and Natalie and their different perceptions of the way they grew up since neither married someone from the neighborhood. The book makes a large point around the ways they'll never be able to understand their partners entirely because they could never fully understand the world they grew up in.
Plot: 4 I have mixed feelings on the plot situation since the sections varied so much. I struggled with the beginning of the book because Leah's section is so circular. It felt like Smith was trying far too hard to milk two plot points and not much interiority. I was relieved to realize the plot wasn't just going to cycle for 400 pages when we suddenly switched perspectives. It also gave me a hint that this world was much bigger and that a big theme would be the tenuous connections of place. Felix's chapters had improved pacing and the tension hanging over of what we knew from Leah's section propelled it. Natalie's section also benefits from this as we have all the knowledge that's come before to color her life story. The pacing is even faster here as her life story is composed of fragmented vignettes, and I found myself much more invested in Natalie's story and increased interiority. This last segment is where it all clicked together for me.
Writing: 4 This book reminds me of Intermezzo, and I think that's what got me through the first section because Intermezzo got so much better as it settled into itself. Like Rooney's latest, this book uses formatting and entirely different prose styles as a way to differentiate the characters in a way that feels separate from bestowing unique voices. In this book, dialogue is denoted at different times with dashes, new lines, double quotation marks, single quotation marks, and making the font smaller and single spaced when the rest is double spaced. Sometimes, it wasn't differentiated at all. This is a lot to navigate as a reader and creates a sense of whiplash. I wished that the voices were given more development in themselves rather than these cosmetic tricks being employed. The ending is great, and there are sections that I adored. It was just a difficult start for me. The expansiveness of the novel and the portrait of a place is pretty stunning by the close of the book.
I'd still say my favorite of Zadie Smith's books I've read so far is On Beauty, but I'll commend her for how different all of her novels feel.
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