Generally, I love Zadie Smith’s work. I’ve found both her fiction and her essays compelling and enriching for me, even inspiring, but The Fraud largely falls flat for me. William Ainsworth, the bumbling novelist of the book, writes historical fiction. I ought to have written it down when Mrs. Eliza Touchet comments on the lack of market for historical novels. While all of his contemporaries outshine him, Ainsworth’s novels are alienating and Mrs. Touchet routinely questions their quality, often to amusing effect (which I’ll touch on again shortly). I can’t help but feel that the same criticisms might be levelled against Zadie Smith’s contemporary Victorian novel.
There are some details I find curious in Zadie Smith’s career that can’t help but influence my reading of The Fraud,.
- I remember Smith noting in an essay or interview that, unlike a number of novelists, she starts writing a book at the beginning and keeps writing until the story is done. Many novelists do intricate plotting, write scenes out of order, and then compile it all together. Structurally, The Fraud actually appears more like the latter approach, and I can’t help but wonder if that was part of Smith’s process this time around. The novel is a series of vignettes, often spanning no more than two or three pages. The benefit of the structure is that the chapters pass by rapidly and it makes the novel more engaging. The downside is that it feels like a series of fragmentary false starts.
- I really adore how Smith can make me appreciate books I’ve never read or enjoyed and in Changing My Mind, she has an essay about E. M. Forster and his dedication to writing about common people, capturing their language, revealing their hearts, and so on. Smith has an extraordinarily touching approach to reading Forster and now I feel like I need someone to present a similar essay for The Fraud. Generally speaking, I had a hard time getting invested in the characters. I think because of the milieu and format of the book, it was difficult to give characters the room to breathe and grow on you slowly. I had flashes of connection, but the book grinds to a halt after about 240 pages where Andrew Bogle’s whole backstory is explained for about 100 pages. At that point in the story, all of its primarily threads take a back seat. I found that a narrative slog, though I have to admit that Smith successfully emulates the Victorian novelist’s approach of giving life stories of characters regardless of relevance.
- I have a vague memory of reading Zadie Smith’s Wikipedia page years ago. I tried to go through the revision history and couldn’t find it, so apologies for that and if I’ve misremembered this. The description I remember reading was about a different concept and I can’t help but wonder if Smith struggled with writing this, which is why it seems unfocused.
- In one of the essays in Zadie Smith’s pandemic book, Intimations, she boils down the reason that people write as follows: it is something to do. The lack of pretension is refreshing, but it doesn’t exactly inspire exaltation towards literature. That motif is taken up in this book, where Mrs. Touchet doubts both her cousin and Dickens’ writing. Touchet herself has some writerly ambitions, documenting both the trial of Sir Roger Tichborne and the life history of Andrew Bogle. I’m left with the message that writing ought to focus on the common people and their experiences, which is in line with Smith’s commentary on Forster, but it leads to a thematic conundrum, as well.
I’ll break off from my numbered list here to focus on the thematic conundrum and one of the more interesting elements of the text. This novel could not have been written without Donald Trump. Or else, it wouldn’t read the same. There are so many echoes of Trump in Tichborne’s appeal to the masses, the justifications of his fraud, and outright lies. Roger Tichborne and his supporters echo the rhetoric of Trumpian populists, which is at an odd disconnect of Smith’s elevation of the common folk—perhaps Smith is offering two different models of populism that run into a conflict with one another.
We see some of the complaints against the Tichborne case emerge that sound familiar to certain other high profile legal cases of today. One person complains that the trial is “rigged before it’s even begun!” (86) and the narrator describes the courtroom viewers as follows:
“They had no choice but to mark them, loud as they were, continuous, and long. Leaning like a sailor in the doorway, Sarah now extemporized on the ‘shadowy Freemasons’ who ‘run the Old Bailey’ and the ‘bitter Catholics’ who pay the bribes to the Freemasons who run the Old Bailey, and the ‘Hebrew moneylenders’ who earn a guinea for every soul thrown in Newgate. She was decrying the many vital Tichborne witnesses presently being ‘silenced’ in Brazil and New South Wales” (86).
There are too many parallels to ignore, particularly because in Intimations, Smith has an essay expressing optimism that Trump is a temporary problem—someone who leads in times of chaos but is later dismissed as not being a genuine leader for building a future. So, when Smith uses words like “rigged” that are so clearly an echo of Trumpish language, and talks about all the conspiratorial figures that are ‘silencing’ the truth, all I hear are echoes of our contemporary world.
To her credit, as much as the historical novel is disconnected from our time and place, it nonetheless speaks to contemporary concerns. The language might change, but the fomenting of paranoia and dissent remains. Sarah, Ainsworth’s wife, is staunchly pro-Tichborne, who is, remember, a low-class man trying to claim status as a member of the aristocracy to obtain a fortune. When Sarah’s logic is challenged, she swings back with exceptions and possibilities:
“And who don’t know the power of such clans? Who’s not heard of how an ill-timed confession can be turned against you! Girls locked up in convents and all sorts! Never to be seen again! Shadowy, they are. Never got over their royal disappointment, if you understand me. But they’re patient, these Catholics. They lay in wait. Sit on their money, and keep it where we can’t see it. And here’s Sir Roger trying his best to pull back the veil over all that shadowy business! Now, naturally, they don’t like that! Naturally, they’re going to destroy him best they can! Every newspaper’s against him—well, what does that tell you? Whose side are they on? The people’s? Decent common people like yourself? Not bloody likely!’” (109)
Excuse me if I’m being pedantic, but there’s such obvious parallels here to the Trump mindset. The girls being locked up in shadowy convents might as well be Pizzagate. The Q-anon nonsense (Q-anonsense!) that turns everything into an antisemitic conspiracy here swaps out the anti-Catholic rhetoric of early 1900s England. And who is going to “pull back the veil” (otherwise “drain the swamp”)? Roger Tichborne, of course! And why does nobody like what he’s saying? Well, “every newspaper’s against him”---it’s all fake news, of course!
Where this criticism goes is a little bit harder to discern. As I mentioned earlier, there seems to be a disconnect of populisms here, where Smith elevates common people and attempts to reveal their inner depths, but there are clear barbs against the populist nonsense of Trump supporters. The alternative is maybe an ethics of attention and care, a commitment to understanding, but I think that might require some more elucidation.
Elsewhere, protestors identify their demands: “Banning all taxes [...] bringing back the bill of rights, an honest press, fair representation of the people, um … no smallpox vaccinations for children, the defence of the aforementioned fools and fanatics — and, well, much petitioning for the release of you-know-who!” (435). While the first few claims sound like “make England great again!”, the latter ones clearly speak to the antivaxxers of the pandemic.
What is kind of interesting is how Smith looks for a middle ground through the character of Eliza Touchet. She wants to support Tichborne, but “In this new, expanding world of Tichbornism, there existed a strange struggle in which Mrs Touchet’s continuing commitment to the cause had to be constantly compared to Sarah’s and found wanting, even if, in truth, the enthusiasm wa waning in them both” (435). There’s a metacommentary here on the radicalization of politics, of course. (Incidentally, I have to say, in Feel Free, Zadie Smith refers to conservatives as “arsonists” and that lives in me always). The problem remains, though, that the people have to constantly check themselves against the normalization of extremes in politics. To be pro-Trump is not to be pro-Trump enough, so the views become more and more extreme.
I liked the courtroom scene and the exploration of the case, even if it was a little too focused on characters’ histories rather than presenting evidence in a more procedural manner. When the court case concluded, though, it felt like another dropped thread. Nothing quite got the attention it deserved—even Mrs. Touchet’s refusal to touch her husband’s money on moral grounds was quickly resolved when Touchet decides to pay it out to his illegitimate children. There might also have been more made of the abolitionist pursuits that ran contemporary to the case here. There were lots of opportunities, but they all take somewhat of a backseat—the Grand History cedes to the everyday folk.
Earlier, I referenced the humour of the novel. There’s some entertaining barbs against William Ainsworth in particular. Running through the novel are some erotic scenes between Mrs. Eliza Touchet and her cousin William Ainsworth (don’t worry—it’s by marriage, so it’s George Michael Bluth approved),where he submits to Mrs. Touchet’s abuse. It’s funnier than it is erotic, though, and the way it’s used as a vehicle for criticizing his writing is entertaining:
“He was excitable as the boy she had met in the basement all those years ago, and there was a charm in that, although sometimes, in bed, she put the rolled-up rag in his mouth because she sensed that he liked it and sometimes simply in the practical sense to stop him from recounting the plot of his novel” (44). I like the way that Smith constructs the sentence to be such a lengthy one that begins with a positive expression of Ainsworth’s enthusiasm before meandering its way to an insult. It’s moments like that that show she still has a knack for effective writing, even when the project as a whole doesn’t particularly engage me.
I think what makes Smith’s works so effective is her ability to engage with peoples’ interior worlds. This novel often drifts along the surface of things, but really gains force in its final chapters. The pacing of the novel is an issue in that respect, too, since there were so many more opportunities to have a deep exploration of interiority.
There are some general lessons about our interior worlds that are worth exploring. Mrs. Touchet, for example, examines the motives of the Tichborne defenders. She asks, “What possesses people? Unhappiness, always. Happiness is otherwise occupied. It has an object on which to focus. It has daisies, it has snowdrifts. Unhappiness opens up the void, which then requires filling. With things like angry letters to The Times” (169). It’s an astute observation regarding the behaviours of people in society, which is elaborated on a little later when Smith writes, “She would be gentle and mindful of Sarah’s hurt feelings, always remembering that false beliefs are precisely the ones we tend to cling to most strongly” (185). It’s geared almost towards a politics of desire or pleasure. Happiness is occupied, and unhappiness cannot be appeased, especially when it holds strongly to false beliefs.
Where the book shines is in its final pages. Touchet discovers William’s dead body and the response she has is pretty powerful. The depiction of William’s death is such a pathetic end, but it has a poetic layer to it that it’s hard not to comment on. When she sees him, “She knew her cousin had never cared to think himself a figure in another man’s story — much less a woman’s — but in this moment it was unavoidable: she was his only witness and mourner” (449). A lengthy time has passed since they last held hands, or, as Smith writes, “since she’d last held it, or held it down” (449), followed by a particularly scandalous claim. She examines the callouses on his writing fingers, which had become “ugly and pronounced” (449), which seems a statement on the gratuitousness of his self-congratulatory writing. In Touchet’s mind, “All is change. All is loss” (449). She then notes how “so much of life is delusion. Each attempt to make a crossing, every high-altitude ambition that any person might conceive of in this world — all of it falls eventually, inevitably, at His feet, and comes to nothing” (449). Her reflections on William’s mortality serve as a counterpoint to her own desire to live well, despite recognizing that “this desire was not a properly feminine aspiration, nor perhaps even godly. She wanted to live. To make her own attempt at life, on her own terms, and to defend the attempts of others, be they ever so poor, forgotten, debased, despised! Some people live for love, or for work, or for their children. Eliza Touchet had lived for an idea: freedom. And when her own time came, yes, when she herself lay dead, very likely in this same room, she could a t least leave this world safe in the knowledge that —” (449-450). This lengthy explanation of her interior world is enriching. It’s just a shame that it takes until the end of the book to get there. Perhaps the issue is that there are not big enough moments throughout the book to precipitate such meditations on mortality.
The scene continues with her genuine morning. She refers to him as “the only person who had ever really known her, and therefore the only one from whom it had been worth keeping secrets” (450). It’s an interesting dynamic. Considering how intent Touchet is on other people’s behaviours and inner worlds (her ‘novel’ about Andrew Bogle, for instance), she seems oddly distanced from herself yet while also self-assured. She screams, perhaps in response to his death, but also in response to the thought that he was the only one who ever really knew her (which is repeated in italics). The conflicting emotions and proliferation of question marks in the final passages brings the book’s conclusion to a satisfying, conflicted, difficult, emotional end. That said, immediately afterward, she shifts towards practical concerns which point once again to the social realism of the late Victorian milieu. She starts asking question about who owns the house, who would write in his study, and so on, while the final line of the book suggests that “The mysteries of Mrs. Touchet were, finally, unfathomable” (451). She is unknown to herself now that he’s gone. Again, it’s a troubling end of the book that lingers.
It’s a little bit rare, actually, to find a book that has a milquetoast approach throughout but dazzles in the end. I just wish that those dazzling moments could be a little more interspersed throughout the other 450 pages. It would have solved a number of my issues with connection to the characters and given something a little bit more to hang on to amid all the diverse plot threads.
My review began with the idea of disappointment. I’ll point toward the silver lining at least a little bit. To be disappointed means that I had to be ‘appointed’ before. Zadie Smith has a great deal of talent, is an extraordinarily perceptive writer and thinker, and has attempted to do a very different kind of book this time around (and I admire people who write different books all the time!). Writers are allowed to have varying quality to their books, and the milieu of this one wasn’t for me. As time passes, I’m sure this book will be discussed productively and critically, but I don’t think I’ll be the one to reread and explore it more thoroughly myself. Instead, I need someone to “Zadie Smith” Zadie Smith—that is, I need a brilliant reader and essayist to elevate the value of this particular work and help me to see it in a different way. In the meantime, I’ll wait for Smith’s next book.
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