thinking about zadie smith without reading any zadie smith

just read this article, 'Entering History: Zadie Smith and the Condition of the Social Novel' by Rosemarie Ho, which i thought was very good. like the main reason i'm making this post is just to acknowledge that and keep it somewhere i can remember it. in school we once had to write an "argumentative article", a pretty impactful activity 4 me because i remember being good at it, whilst becoming very conscious that that sort of emphatic journalistic style is easily rude or cringey. i know those techniques wherever i see them now. anyway, here's a bit from Ho's work i really admired, precisely because it threads that needle of using those techniques whilst also reading well:

 

Not many social phenomena or institutions have been left unscathed in her work: animal-rights groups, academia, Buddhism, celebrity, conservatism, dance moms, the English legal profession, fundamentalist Islamic terrorism, glee clubs (“the revenge of white boy soul”), Hollywood films (yellowface and blackface)—and that’s just the first third of the alphabet.
 

Ho's piece is about Zadie Smith's most recent novel, The Fraud, which i haven't read. it's generally a really solid bit of criticism: she starts by outlining the things which work in the book, which are interesting and convincing and made me want to read the novel, before launching into critique, which remain interesting and convincining, and don't stop me wanting to read it, but do adjust the way i would. i have been thinking about criticism a lot lately - i'm taking letterboxd very seriously (this is not a joke)(i am using it to think about critique, to swap in positionality for argumentativeness, and i enjoy it)(it is the only place where i regularly post, hmu if interested), and Ho's piece does it at a length i don't often get to read. i have an apathetic relationship with Smith: i've read White Teeth twice, in very different contexts, but nothing else she's written, which makes me simultaneously feel unqualified to speak on her, and as though i had my fill. so i found the piece useful in articulating some of my hesitations with her approach: something about the breadth and simultaneous dearth of feeling, or even movement, except for that of time and place. another quote: this new novel is a historical one, and so, Ho writes, in it, 'a genealogy of our past is refashioned into an analogy for our present; history is replaced by empty chronology (or the eternal return of the same)'.

because The Fraud is historical, and interested in the nineteenth century literary scene, and because Smith's approach has always been read as Dickensian, Ho spends some time with the history of the novel, and its particular 19th cent social guise.* and this is actually why i wanted to write something here, although it'll probably take less space than the footnote. but i am not up on my novel studies. even though i have a literature degree, and have been working my way through Proper Old Novels with real zeal lately, i just don't know that period of literary history.
and i was thinking about why, and it's because i don't care. or rather, i don't care for a historical explanation of literary forms, at least not at length. this is entirely a matter of taste, not because i don't think there's a place for them. but there's something about the way history as a discipline frames literature, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth century as a matter of facts and parties which i find dull. it's the lack, i suppose, to bring it back to my opening point (wow), of literary criticism. the reason i like literature is because it's history through analysis, rather than archeology. i know there's good historical work going on, but so much of it is so cautious about bringing the present to the past (despite that inevitably happening anyway), so that it's just carefully brushing off the bones and facts we've found. but i think there's so much need and space to recognise now in the then, even if it's just in considering difference. i think that might be why i liked Ho's piece so much. i have been burned by disciplinary disappointment in several non-fiction books this year btw.
but i would like to know more about the (anglophone, probably :/) novel as a form. i've been trying to think about good bits of lit crit i've read, or heard of which might do that: The Country and The City by Raymond Williams, which i've been meaning to read properly for a bit, comes to mind, but not much more. i'll be keeping my eye out anyway. let me know if you've read anything good. wow this is really long now, which i guess is appropriate for literally all the subject matter, but i really have to go, so i will.




* on Smith and Dickens, both Ho and Smith's wikipedia page point to a 2000 article, written just after White Teeth was published, which i (amidst the double peer pressure) also just read. it, 'Human, All Too Inhuman: On the formation of a new genre: hysterical realism' by James Wood, uses Dickens as a way to explain and critique Smith's work, pointing out the trick of balancing character and caricature. Wood uses him convincingly, i think: the piece made me stop and think about what my characters, if i ever put them to paper, would do. it's also another example, a mighty wave, of argumentative prose. i thought this was good, a really useful way of articulating why appropriate metaphor and voice matter: '“Beat” is not Samad’s word; he would never use it. It is Smith’s word, and in using it she not only speaks over her character, she reduces him, obliterates him.'
also, and this is tangential but interesting to me, the piece quotes Smith: 'It is not the writer’s job, she says, “to tell us how somebody felt about something, it’s to tell us how the world works.”' it is astounding how i disagree with this read. pedantically, neither of these are the writer's job - the job, surely, is to write - but i do feel the strength in the art form, in any art form created by one person, is in feeling, not explanation. hell, even in my phd thesis - an inherently explanatory piece of text - i'm having to entrench what i do explain in what i feel, because i'm so conscious that my take is coloured by my belief and situation. and maybe this is changing fashion over the last 25 years, towards reflexivity, and maybe this is Smith's relative naivety at the time of being quoted (or mine - i'm only a year or so older than she was, and maybe my opinion will shift, or maybe it's that i don't trust the opinion of someone my age), but god. idk. i love feeling and i'm hesitant to celebrate one person's read on the world.