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Title: NW
Author: Zadie Smith
Genre: Fiction, Black Fiction
Length: 401 pages
Series or Stand Alone: Stand Alone
Release Date: September 4, 2012
Publishing House: The Penguin Press
Synopsis:
This is the story of a city.
The northwest corner of a city. Here you’ll find guests and hosts, those with power and those without it, people who live somewhere special and others who live nowhere at all. And many people in between.
Every city is like this. Cheek-by-jowl living. Separate worlds.
And then there are the visitations: the rare times a stranger crosses a threshold without permission or warning, causing a disruption in the whole system. Like the April afternoon a woman came to Leah Hanwell’s door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, forcing Leah out of her isolation…
Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragi-comic new novel follows four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – as they try to make adult lives outside of Caldwell, the council estate of their childhood. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their London is a complicated place, as beautiful as it is brutal, where the thoroughfares hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead-end.
Depicting the modern urban zone – familiar to town-dwellers everywhere – Zadie Smith’s NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself.
My Review
My initial reaction was that the author has a very descriptive writing style. She writes in the style that a particular character that is narrating thinks. The first half which is narrated by Leah. Her disconnected thought process combined with the British slang made it a little hard to follow in the moment. When I stepped back and looked at it in whole, it made sense. The section narrated by Natalie was set up in lists. It was very organized and you knew immediately what was going on. I rarely venture outside of the Science Fiction genre so this is a type of writing is a bit new to me.
Like I mentioned, the first part of the book is narrated by Leah. She has a philosophy degree and is very kind-hearted. She is so kind-hearted that she can be a bit naive. I actually disliked her character. She never really spoke up for herself and whines to herself a lot. In a way, she had a Peter Pan complex and in a woman who is 30, has a crappy job, and an ambitious husband, it was kind of annoying. I found myself wanted her section to over very quickly. I struggled to get through it and it almost made me put the book down. The only reason I finished it was because I knew I had this review coming up.
Felix’s story wasn’t that memorable to me.
I like Natalie a lot more than I do Leah. Natalie started her story from the time her and Leah met all the way up to the moment. She talked about what happened during that year that they were not friends, what she did in college, and how she got where she was in her career. She is extremely ambitious. I connected with her. I understood how she felt. She was the smart and determined one. But she had certain qualities that I disliked as well. She did things because she thought she was supposed to do them. It was not necessarily because she was happy. She ended up taking care of 3 children, which included her husband. She also thought about things too technical. But this section was definitely easier to read.
The plot was a bit jumpy for me and that added to the distaste. I understand it was about Londoners and their lives, but the characters had too many flaws and so much going on, that it became hard for me to comprehend all together.
Overall, I don’t think I will be reading another book from this author. It was kind of interesting and nice to venture out into another style, but I’m quickly retracing my steps back to what I know. It just was not my cup of tea.
Rating: 4/10
Later loves,
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
