Every time some new writing by Zadie Smith enters the world, my
insides do a dance. Earlier this summer, on Broadway, minding my own, I
caught the words “HOW ZADIE SMITH WRITES HER NOVELS BY ZADIE SMITH” in
purple all-caps on the cover of the Believer through Bailey/Coy
Books’ window. I locked up my bike, bought the magazine, and took it
next door to Ali Baba, the Mediterranean restaurant with the
left-over-from-when-it-was-a-Hollywood-themed-burger-place
yellow-and-red decor. It was empty, an unpromising vibe, but I would
have eaten my arm if someone had a good idea how to cook it; all I
wanted was something to jam down my gullet while I read, and they had
chilled seltzer (not easy to find). I ordered a falafel sandwich and a
Greek salad and two cans of seltzer and opened the Believer and,
in the middle of Smith’s essay—funny, amazing, etc.—watched
some guy approach Ali Baba, read the menu, open the door, hesitate,
come inside, and hesitate some more. He wore a backward baseball cap
and had a clean Pyrex casserole dish under one arm, and at the counter
he said, “Yeah, can I snag a gyro? Combo?”
I wrote these details down in the margins of the Believer because they were so individuating, so particular to this human being
lifted out of the fray of the sidewalk and into the fluorescent
attention of the empty Ali Baba. What was his hesitation? What was with
the Pyrex? How about that “snag”? He seemed like a successful Zadie
Smith character—with just these few details, he’d lift off the
page. Smith’s genius at character is undisputed; if you’ve read her
novels you have the company of at least a half dozen peculiar, pretty
inventions stuck in your brain somewhere. But her sentences, the mud
she makes her characters from, are as particular as the characters
themselves—that Zadie Smithish perspective and tone. As she has
said elsewhere, perspective and tone are tantamount to a rendering of a
consciousness in the world, the writer’s consciousness. The perspective
and tone of Smith’s work hasn’t changed much since December of 1999,
before White Teeth was ever published in the U.S., when the
New Yorker published a short story of hers called “Stuart.” That
story begins:
This is the truth, whichever way you look at it. There are these two
Greek guys. One is huge as hell, with a melon for a face: round,
yellowish, moist, pitted with black-headed acne—and yet genial,
all the same. It isn’t exactly the kind of face the Italians call
simpatico, but it’s without malice, the way a melon is without malice.
It is generous just because it is neutral, and neutral is a sight to
behold in certain quarters of the city where men wear their featuresaggressively, like national flags.
Those are a striking couple of sentences—colloquial, funny,
vivid; marked by a free-
floating knowledge of the city and the
world; spoken by a narrator who isn’t a character in the story and yet
is totally a character; marvelous all around. Smith’s novels all
unfold at the hand of this authorial character whose job is to
characterize the characters. According to the second page of her essay
in the Believer, which is titled “That Crafty Feeling” and is a
lecture she gave at Columbia University in March 2008, Smith doesn’t
have a whole lot of articulate insight into how this omniscient
narrator with free-floating opinions works: “For though I have a
private language for the way I write, as every writer does, as I’m sure
all of you do, it’s not particularly intelligent—in fact, it’s
rather banal. It feels strange, airing it in public, inadequate, unfit
for a classroom.” She feels tempted “to gussy it up a bit, to find a
garment to dress your private language in, something suitable. You
borrow the quantifying language of the critic,” and goes on to say that
the problem with this is that critics analyze craft after the fact,
that “they can’t help a writer as she writes.”
She goes on:
I felt this with force recently as I read James Wood’s How
Fiction Works.
It’s a very brilliant book, particularly astute on what James calls
the “intimate third person.” Making my way through that chapter, the
readerly part of my brain thrilled at the precision and insight with
which he goes to work on this neglected aspect of fictional craft. But
the writer in me, the one who has written pages of intimate
third-person fiction—without ever consciously considering it,
without giving it any particular name—wanted to throw the book
across the room, and not because he was wrong, but because he was
exactly right. It felt like being asked to be attentive to your
breathing, to your in, out, in, out, in, out… I thought: If
I read one more word about the intimate third person, I’ll never be
able to write the bloody thing again.
This was frustrating to read because, although How Fiction
Works came out in England in February 2008, it still wasn’t out
here when I was sitting there in Ali Baba eating and reading, and all I
wanted to do was go back to Bailey/Coy and snag it, get some precision
and insight into this thing Smith has done for years and never
consciously considered (hard to believe). After all, it’s marvelous
that Smith’s novels are packed with characters, with people behaving
people-y, so many of them, and that she maneuvers around their
individual versions of the world so effortlessly and often within a
sole sentence or paragraph, but what’s truly marvelous in the
maneuvering is the track she has to build to do this, the apparatus
itself—this third-person intimate that she’s learned from E. M.
Forster (did it all the time) and Vladimir Nabokov (did it in
Pnin) and updated with new-millennium colloquialisms and
attitudes. (As a side note, it’s also intriguing to read such a
recommendation of How Fiction Works from a writer who’s been so
savaged by Wood in the past: In a review of her novel The Autograph
Man in 2002, he went so far as to parody her. They’ve gone back and
forth about realism in post-9/11 fiction—entertainingly,
brilliantly—for years, including in the pages of the
Guardian. You’ll have to Google it.)
Wood’s book is divided into 10 chapters (“Narrating,” “Detail,”
“Sympathy and Complexity”), and each chapter is divided into dozens of
small, numbered sections, some as short as four lines, most no longer
than a page. Some breaks seem arbitrary, although they make reading the
book seem less like reading and more like skipping stones, or jumping
from stone to stone in a river. For all the lit history and fiction
theory, it’s a gloriously swift read. There isn’t really a chapter, as
Smith says there is, on intimate third person, at least not in the
American edition, but there’s a bunch of stuff about intimate third
person, and omniscience itself, scattered into the chapters “Narrating”
and “Flaubert and Modern Narrative.” For example: “As soon as someone
tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself
around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on
his or her way of thinking and speaking.” And: “Thanks to free indirect
style, we see things through the character’s eyes and language but also
through the author’s eyes and language. We inhabit omniscience and
partiality at once. A gap opens between author and character, and the
bridge—which is free indirect style itself—between them
simultaneously closes that gap and draws attention to its
distance.”
You see that bending to the character, that inhabiting of
omniscience and partiality at once, in those opening lines of “Stuart”
(the narrator’s talking like a street vendor, which is what the Greek
guys are) and in Smith’s novels, and if you are young and stupid and
you read Smith’s novels before you read Forster’s, you might extend to
her the credit for inventing the trick. Wood unearths tons of even
better examples of intimate third person—aka “free indirect
style”—from the work of “its founder,” Gustave Flaubert, as well
as Henry James, Nabokov, James Joyce, John Updike (who supplies an
example of third-person intimate done poorly), David Foster Wallace
(whose fiction “prosecutes an intense argument about the decomposition
of language in America, and he is not afraid to decompose—and
discompose—his own style in the interests of making us live
through this linguistic America with him”), and, wonderfully, Robert
McCloskey, whose children’s book Make Way for Ducklings has this
sentence in it: “Just as they were getting ready to start on their way,
a strange enormous bird came by.” That “strange” belongs to McCloskey’s
removed but not totally removed third-person narrator, who is right
there inhabiting the confusion of the father duck at the sight of a
swan-shaped boat.
You don’t have to be a serious nerd about sentences—about
where their power comes from, where their batteries are—to love
this book, although it helps. Though I’ve spent a bunch of time here on
Wood’s discussion of the subtleties and ironies and paradoxes of
third-person intimate/free indirect style, that’s just one of many
excuses he comes up with to take sentences out of great books, pin them
to a cotton pad, and scrape at their guts.
He quotes a passage of scene-setting in Flaubert’s Sentimental
Education and notes that “each detail is almost frozen in its gel
of chosenness” and that the “details belong to different time
signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are
smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.” He
quotes Anton Chekhov’s story “Ward 6,” in which a doctor is dying in
bed, and while dying: “A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and
graceful, which he had read about the day before, ran past him.” Wood
comments, “How lovely the simplicity with which Chekhov, deep inside
his character’s mind, does not say, ‘He thought of the deer he had been
reading about’ or even, ‘He saw in his mind the deer he had been
reading about,’ but just calmly asserts that the deer ‘ran past him.'”
He marvels at Virginia Woolf’s sentence “The day waves yellow with all
its crops” from The Waves, writing, “I am consumed by this
sentence, partly because I cannot explain why it moves me so… The
secret lies in the decision to avoid the usual image of crops waving,
and instead, to write ‘the day waves’: The effect is suddenly that the
day itself, the very fabric and temporality of the day, seems saturated
in yellow. And then that peculiar, apparently nonsensical ‘waves
yellow’ (how can anything wave yellow?) conveys a sense that yellowness
has so intensely taken over the day itself that it has taken over our
verbs, too—yellowness has conquered our agency.”
It’s a gorgeous display of some of the best short passages in the
English language, this book. And it is short itself. It will make you a
better reader and it will make reading better. There isn’t a page of it
that’s snoozy, in spite of what Walter Kirn says in the New York
Times Book Review (speaking of snoozy). And there aren’t many words
per page. And the font is lovely. I recommend it. As does Zadie
Smith.
I believe you meant to say “the typeface is lovely.”