NW by Zadie Smith (Penguin Books, 2012)
“Ambitious though she was, she was still a NW girl at heart”.
What is true of her fictional creation Natalie Blake, is also true of Zadie Smith.
It’s another way of saying : ‘you can take a woman out of NW but you can’t take NW out of the woman’.
Zadie Smith’s last novel, On Beauty, transferred E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End to contemporary Boston. It was highly praised but met with some criticism from American readers for the lack of authenticity in getting the stateside vernacular right.
As a consequence, Smith has vowed never to set another novel in the U.S. and has returned to the safe and known territory of her manor, principally Willesden and Kilburn in North West London.
The loyalty to this zone is voiced by Leah Hanwell, the other of the two female protagonists in the novel,: “Leah is as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries. She knows the way people speak around here, that ‘fuckin’, around here, is only a rhythm in a sentence.”
This is not to say that this is the most fashionable or desirable part of London. It is described thus: “Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never came here. Here bust is permanent”.
I would hazard a guess that Leah, white, and the more ambitious Natalie (Keisha) Blake, black, represent two sides to Zadie Smith’s character – Natalie is swotty and conventional, Leah is more worldly, rebellious and less idealistic. Continue reading
