30 Aug 2012 10:52:12
Her previous novel, On Beauty, set in a New England university town was widely admired by critics, but Zadie Smith, whose eagerly anticipated fourth novel, NW, has just been published, has said she will not set another work in America.
The author – whose public appearances are increasingly rare, and who declined to be photographed – told the audience at the Edinburgh international book festival that she had received a great deal of feedback, pointing out inaccuracies in On Beauty.
The novel, with a cast including a West Indian professor, a would-be rapper, an east coast poet and a Florida hospital administrator, took on two utterly different academic families, the Belseys and the Kippses, who, despite an intellectual feud pursued by their patriarchs, become embroiled in each other's lives.
"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific things that Americans don't say and English people don't realise … Also New York has enough writers, and I don't think I need to add to them," she said.
With NW, Smith has returned to her home turf: the north-west London where she grew up, describing the simultaneously tangled and divergent lives of four people in their 30s who were all born on the same housing estate. She said she wanted to "replicate the experience" of London through its often discontinuous and stylistically diverse prose. "You can imagine the same book written in a really smooth tone, but the city I grew up in isn't like that ... Life is not smooth and seamless, and I wanted to replicate that, too."
Smith said that if the novel did anything new, she hoped it was "to demonstrate that people of colour do not think of themselves as exotic or other to themselves. We think of ourselves as white people think of yourselves, as central to ourselves, and not some stylisation, political points, added extras: none of those things. We are ourselves."
NW was a surprise miss on the Man Booker longlist, although critics have so far been enthusiastic: the Observer urged that "you should rush to buy this book before the summer is out", and the Scotsman praised it as "delightful, intelligent and fundamentally grown-up", declaring it a shame that it had been overlooked for the prize.
Smith, who splits her time between London and the US, where she is a professor at New York University's English department, also spoke about how having a child had changed her as a writer. She warned that there might be a long time before we see another book because "lady writers with children, we're on a different schedule". NW had been eight years in the writing.
The author of the novels White Teeth and The Autograph Man said that motherhood had changed her in an extreme way, both "practically and aesthetically", limiting her writing time to four or five hours a day. "Normally young writers have all the time in the world and they don't always use it well," she said. "Practically, I wasn't interested in 80-page chapters any more – I couldn't stay in that mindset for that period of time."
She added: "People with children will know this: when the childcare is over, it's over on the dot. You immediately have to go into child mode; there's no down time. I would stop writing and would have no chance to think about the book at all, nothing. Then in the morning, it was as if someone else had written it." This distance – looking at her work with a sense of objectivity, as a reader would, was one of the greatest experiences you can have as a writer, she said.
Smith said she had not set out with a carefully devised plan for the book but, rather, she had embarked "like a jazz musician" who "has some scales, some tone, a colour, and the rest is improvisation". She added: "I always think of plot as a great weakness of mine – it was only by not consciously concentrating on the plot that the plot worked out … The subconscious is a great organiser of material. I felt this book was the best plotted [of mine], but it came without any plan."
Part of the "feeling" of the book, she said, was a sense of expressing how it feels to be in time – the "genuine relativity" of time speeding up as one gets older. She had also wanted to pick through the intricate class system that operates in London, with poverty and wealth existing cheek by jowl.
"My feeling is that people in particular classes look on people in other classes with some kind of pity or sorrow, or with a feeling that life must, by necessity, be hard in this other class. My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity … that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity."
