The Fraud. Zadie Smith. 2023.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that I really don’t like novels about writers. I can see why novelists write them; writing, or failing to write, is an experience that is of vital importance to writers, and why shouldn’t people write what they know? Of course they should, and they will. But I fear there’s something that gets lost as the career of writing becomes increasingly out of reach for normal people and the person who actually gets to publish novels is increasingly the same kind of rich kid who has always been able to do nothing but write.
All of this is to say why I started this novel with a chip on my shoulder. A novel about a novelist? By someone who was lucky enough to get her first novel published at twenty-two to universal acclaim and has never had a regular person job? There’s no way I’ll like it. I’m frustrated to say that I loved it.
I think it helped that the novel isn’t really about a novelist, but about all of the people around him who make the novel writing possible. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot; it’s been hard to write since my son was born, and I have to have a full time job on top of that. It’s harder and harder for anyone to write and sell books unless that person can also commit to being a full-time, one-person promotional campaign for those books, which again tends to pre-select for a certain kind of writer. There’s apparently a movement on the rise to include official credits pages in books, and I can see why - it has always taken the labor of a lot of people, official and not, to make a book happen. Even a bad one is a lot of work, much of that the domestic work of women and servants.
The Fraud is about a lot of things; it’s about feeling creatively stifled, it’s about the appeal of mindless, contradictory populism (I suspect it would be a different book if we weren’t in the time of Trump and Boris Johnson), it’s about aging and being in love with imperfect people and being a parent. But most of all it’s about the invisible work of invisible people - all of the people who make novel writing and empire building possible. The two protagonists, Mrs. Touchet and Andrew Bogle, live very different lives but are alike in their unacknowledged, unnurtured intellectual gifts. They both spend their lives in the service of those who are less competent, less observant, and less conscientious than they. They both make the celebrated work of others possible, in ways large and small, and neither is rewarded for it. They both know great love and lose it, losses that they must bear alone. Their fleeting but deep connection is real, and valuable to them, but nothing comes of it. Mrs. Touchet doesn’t become a great writer by telling Mr. Bogle’s story, and Mr. Bogle is rewarded neither for being loyal to his former masters nor for switching sides.
This is a novel about writing, but it’s also a novel about everything that isn’t writing, and everything that has to happen first before writing can happen. It’s truly an impressive work.