It really is a classic situation. Young writer, graduating from an English Literature course at Cambridge University, UK, with a First Class Honors degree, receives a near-record advance for her first novel on the basis of its first 80 pages. It's published to universal acclaim when she is 24. Two years later she comes up with her second effort. It is deemed a major disappointment, and fashionable London switches from lauding her to the skies (the first novel is already a TV series) to denouncing her as a false prophet. She shakes the British dirt off her feet and enrolls for a post-graduate course at Harvard -- in the art of the novel.
Thus the career to date of Zadie Smith, child of a Jamaican mother and an English father, author of the best-selling White Teeth (2000) and now of The Autograph Man.
The truth is less dramatic. This new novel is not at all bad, and in places excellent. If it had been any young writer's first book it would have received very respectful reviews. As it is, it was nominated in the "long list" for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction (the Booker Prize's new name, following the joining of the enterprise by a futures broker) but has recently failed to make the short list.
It is likely to be of special interest in Taiwan, however, because its main character, Alex-Li Tandem, is of Chinese-Jewish descent. Alex-Li's father, Tan Li-Jin, emigrated from Beijing to the UK where someone suggested he changed his family name to Tandem. As the novel opens he is running a Chinese medicine practice in a London suburb, and taking his son, together with his two friends, to a wrestling match in the Albert Hall.
This is only by way of a prelude, however. By the time the novel proper gets under way the father is dead and Alex-Li, now 27, is living as a dealer in celebrity autographs. He has just crashed his expensive sports car into a bus stop, with his girlfriend Esther in the passenger seat, while under the influence of a hallucinogenic substance. He has an obsession with a little-remembered Hollywood star called Kitty Alexander, star of The Girl from Peking. And before long he is on a plane to New York with the aim of tracking down the 77-year-old recluse.
Among the other boys sitting in Li-Jin's car at the book's start are Mark Rubinfine and Adam Jacobs, both Jewish and the latter also black. By the second chapter, however, Rubinfine (the name he is called by everyone, including his mother) is a rabbi and has various other rabbi friends, each more learned than the other in Kabbalistic mysticism. The unspeakable name of God, plus items printed in Hebrew, are scattered through the text.
Critics have been remarking for some time that it's not the English who are writing the best British novels any more but their former colonial subjects - Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Hari Kunzru and the like. Zadie Smith is certainly up among these pack leaders, with the wit of Jane Austen and the street-wise knowingness of Irvive Welsh, plus something else that is entirely and incomparably her own.
The doings of a Chinese-Jewish autograph dealer constitute a very strange subject for any novel. It isn't the plot, though, that's the first thing to strike you. Rather, it's the manic energy of the comedy, seen first of all in throw-away asides but before long taking over much of the narrative. Next comes the zest, and after that the pathos. Sometimes the book's brilliant, and occasionally it's mind-bending. It is almost continually lively and inventive, and frequently funny (when it isn't about hospitals).
The author is also a wit. Next time someone says to you "I saw the best minds of my generation accept jobs on the fringes of the entertainment industry" or "My bed is my office," you'll know they've been reading Zadie Smith.
It would be wrong to reveal too much of the plot. Let's just say that it hinges on the fact that an autograph leaps in value the moment the person whose signature it is dies. And that the affection for the Chinese in the book extends beyond an appreciation of the beauty of the epicanthic fold.
There are characters you would like to have seen more of, especially Marvin, a young black milkman (it would appear that the British still have milk delivered fresh to the door). He's working as part of a drug rehabilitation scheme, and sometimes delivers more than milk to favored customers.
The British hardback comes complete with a promotional support structure. The paper jacket opens out into a poster, and the words "Fame -- I'm gonna live forever!" are emblazoned across the book's front. It's tempting to believe that the publishers, these days part of the Penguin group, thought the novel as it stood might be in need of some kind of assistance.
Zadie Smith's style has been compared to hip-hop, though literary commentators have preferred to stress her combination of comedy and seriousness. Among the things that she's said in interviews are that she can't write on marijuana (though people are frequently high in this book), that she's long been a fan of Madonna, and that she loves tap-dancing and early musicals.
A second novel is the biggest hurdle any writer of fiction has to confront. A first novel is certain to contain all your youthful obsessions and enthusiasms, and the second is something you simply have to get beyond. After a success as big as White Teeth, readers' expectations are going to be almost impossible to meet anyway. Zadie Smith has passed this distance post with considerable credit, and has no need whatever to embark on an academic study of the art of novel-writing (though getting out of the UK is almost certainly a good idea). All she needs to do is ignore the critics, have confidence in her powers, and quietly get on with her next book. This one, even if disappointing to some fans of White Teeth, nevertheless has quite a lot going for it.
The Autograph Man
By Zadie Smith
419 pages
Hamish Hamilton
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