It is always a pleasure to open a book by an accomplished, confident author, and Zadie Smith is one of those. Her first novel White Teeth was a rollicking tale about a Bangladeshi immigrant and his English friend, and her latest novel, Fraud, returns to historical fiction.
Fraud starts in 1850s England, in the unconventional household of William Ainsworth, a writer who existed in real life. When the book opens, Ainsworth is living with his very young, uneducated wife, their child, and the elegant housekeeper at the center of this novel, Eliza Touchet. Eliza’s own husband had abandoned her, leaving her destitute, and the invitation to help the overwhelmed Frances run her household was a godsend (as well as her only available option). The novel moves back and forth in time to reveal the stories of Ainsworth’s previous marriage, his three middle-aged daughters, the death of his first wife Frances, and Eliza’s sexual relationships with both Frances and William Ainsworth.
Ainsworth is part of the literary mileu of the time, with friends like Charles Dickens and William Thackeray. Of course, modern readers know already that Ainsworth never achieved their lasting fame, and in fact, it becomes clear over the course of the novel that Ainsworth was celebrated only for a short period of time before sinking into obscurity, bitter and envious especially of his arch-rival Dickens. Zadie Smith’s research makes the interactions between the writers convincing and lively.
Also clear is that Eliza is herself a capable writer who has never had the opportunity to become a published writer herself, but who edits Ainsworth’s writing. Smith has thoroughly enjoyed herself with the examples of Ainsworth’s original prose:
‘Zounds!’ he mentally ejaculated. ‘I suspect the little hussy means to refuse him’.
[…]No matter how briskly [Eliza] tried to move through it, this new novel […] proved disheartening. [..] People ejaculated, rejoined, cried out on every page. The many strands of the perplexing plot were resolved either by ‘Fate’, the fulfillment of a gypsy’s curse, or a thunderstorm. It took over three hundred pages for [the protagonist] to work out that the servant who seemed unusually concerned with his future was his mother, and that the fellow who looked so much like him that he could be his father was, indeed, his father.
[…] Passages repeated. She read of Boxgrove’s ‘richly carved wainscoting’ at least half a dozen times. Aristocrats were drowned in obsequious flattery — by the author — while groundsmen and maids were treated as barely sentient.
(I don’t know if this is literary fact or Smith’s fiction, but it made me chortle anyway).
Zadie Smith, in contrast, is very conscious of the lives of those ignored in Ainsworth’s writing — women, the proletariat, and the slaves. Eliza’s story is only one of the three major threads in this novel. The women of the Ainsworth household become fascinated by the ‘Tichborne trial’ of a man who claimed to be a dead baronet. Was this middle-aged, overweight man really Sir Roger Tichborne, who had supposedly died in a shipwreck twenty years earlier? Or was he an audacious butcher from Wapping who knew enough about the real Sir Roger to shamelessly try to inherit the Tichborne estate? Much hinges on the evidence provided by Andrew Bogle, a former slave:
A black man — a very black man — was crossing the stage. His woolly hair was white, neat, and far back on his skull, and his beard was sparse but also neat, pointed like a parson’s. He was not unlike a parson, in fact, everything about him being neat, calculated, black — coat, waistcoat, bow tie, the top hat he held in one hand — and all set off by a high white collar, heavily starched.
And all of a sudden, the novel veers into the backstory of Bogle, whose life played out around the history of slavery on the Jamaica plantations. This is the third thread in the novel, but each thread remained distinct and separate, to the detriment of the novel. Eliza’s and Bogle’s stories were both interesting (the Tichborne trial less so) and Eliza’s abolitionist views provided a rationale for her interest in Bogle, but for me the transition to Bogle’s life history was too abrupt and disjointed.
So Fraud feels like three separate novellas rather than a single novel, and the transitions between the stories can be annoying for a reader. That said, Smith is an excellent writer, and each of the novellas is absorbing in its own right, based on what seems like solid research. The novel is conscious of the constraints on the lives of the women of the time:
Eliza was pricked, on the sudden, by an overwhelming and acute sense of loneliness. [..] A consequence, perhaps, of what old women called ‘The Change’, [which] marked, in the mind of Mrs Touchet, the final hurdle in the ladies’ steeplechase.
The humiliations of girlhood.
The separating of the beautiful from the plain and the ugly.
The terror of maidenhood.
The trials of marriage or childbirth — or their absence.
The loss of that same beauty around which the whole system seems to revolve.
The change of life.
What strange lives women lead!
Meanwhile, the slaves in Jamaica, Andrew Bogle’s ancestors and himself, are constrained with much more violence. The slave women are essentially a harem for the slaveowners and their English plantation managers, and they bear children who they must watch grow into slaves themselves. As they age and become less physically able, they move inevitably down from the first gang to the second and below. The novel is set at a time of slave revolts and public controversy about banning the slave trade, and Bogle has been taken to England where he gets only snippets of news about Jamaica.
Every evening, in the newspapers, the tale of this negro uprising expanded, and Mr Doughty expressed some variation on his relief to no longer be in any way involved with the ‘cursed sugar trade’. Bogle snuck the newspaper back to his quarters after dark and read the long columns by the light of a single candle, trying to understand who exactly was being executed in the town squares for refusing to work. […] After a while he understood that […] what he wanted to know no English paper would ever tell him.
Despite at least a third of the book devoted to Bogle and Jamaica, though, Eliza remains the most distinct character, the one into whose multilayered mind Smith delves the best. This unnevenness, and the three separate stories is why I think White Teeth and On Beauty remain Zadie Smith’s best novels to date.
* You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present. [Zadie Smith in the New Yorker]
Glad you reviewed this. Zadie Smith is a very good writer but I have struggled with some of her books in the past – so loved getting a snippet through your review.