On hoping to get lucky - Claire Lowdon in TLS:

‘No oeuvre is consistently excellent. Which makes reviewing your literary heroes a dangerous kind of roulette. After the bank-breaking brilliance of Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), I overpraised Swing Time (Sunday Times, November 13, 2016), failing to face up to its longueurs and modishness. With her uneven collection of short stories, Grand Union, I kept my chips in my pocket (Sunday Times, September 22, 2019). Now here I am, stepping up to the wheel for a third time, hoping to get lucky.’

(…)

‘It’s reasonable, even advisable, to shop around a bit before committing to a particular look. Smith seemed to be really on to something with On Beauty and NW, which remain among the best books I’ve read by a living writer. Swing Time and Grand Union were a disconcerting return to the drawing board. Now the general hope, when you pick up a new novel by Smith, is that this time she’ll have come to the party dressed simply as herself.’

(…)

‘The group scenes involving Ainsworth’s literary pals are the first warning sign that The Fraud might not be a winner. Sometimes it is hard to work out which obscure Victorian is speaking when. A good deal of prior knowledge is expected. I happen to know that, as a young man, Dickens’s pen name was Boz – but pity the reader who approaches this novel without that information.’

(…)

‘None of this is enough to glue Smith’s unwieldy pile of research notes together. Locally, there is plenty of flair: London, as ever, is vividly evoked; children are brilliantly and unsentimentally observed; and the novel is studded with satisfying aphorisms. But by the midpoint, no amount of goodwill and enthusiasm can avoid the sad conclusion that The Fraud is a bit of a mess. The author has clearly done a vast amount of reading – a fact she acknowledges in the New Yorker article. Jokingly, she describes in it what a fact nerd she became while preparing to write the book. “I was already profoundly boring the members of my household.” But I was bored too: Smith seems to have forgotten that we’re interested in what she can make from the notes, not in the notes themselves. At several points the reader falls head first down a research hole, emerging battered and baffled. I was repeatedly grateful for Wikipedia.
What should a historical novel be like? The answer, I think, is simple: like any other novel.’

(…)

‘Historical fiction has appropriation baked into the deal. It might be scary, but at some point you’ve got to be brave enough to just push off.’

Read the review here.

It’s not often that a reviewer commits to the sin of overpraising.

I assume that the rest of this review was somehow a attempt to atone.

Andrea Long Chu had different issues with Zadie Smith, but at least her essay didn’t seem to be a ceremony of small confessions and not so small atonements.