No, I Haven't Read That: "The Fraud" by Zadie Smith
A Perambulating Bisexual, Charles Dick(ens), and the Bottomless Existentialism of a Writerly Salon.
If there’s one thing you (dear reader), can be sure of, it’s that if I include a picture of Ben Affleck before I launch into one of these void-reverberating literary haranguings, I almost certainly did not enjoy the book I just read.
And that’s not because I don’t like Ben Affleck. I like him fine,1 but I love, just love all the moments he has afforded us, the consuming masses, to vicariously languish in our existentialism as if we, too, are standing shirtless on some incredibly expensive beach after lying to the general public about the permanence or lack thereof of our ill-advised, post-divorce back tattoo. There truly is a Ben For All Seasons, and I plan to utilize all of them that Daddy Getty (Images) will provide.
***Honestly, right now I am getting upset that I didn’t think to dress up as “Beleaguered Ben (With Cigarette)”2 for Halloween, as that costume would’ve been a) niche, b) stupidly and upsettingly LA, and c) incredibly low-investment, which is the only kind of costume my useless pop-culture brain seems able to produce, and only ever at least two days after it would’ve been useful to me. Oh well, we don’t get to pick our strengths; God may not be fair but he is just etc. etc.***
Much like the Ben Affleck/Ana DeArmas double header “Deep Water,” which I watched with my dear friend Veronica and now neither of us can get those hours of our life back—I went into The Fraud really, really wanting to like it. I wanted to like it so much. I very much appreciate Zadie Smith—she’s an excellent essayist; she seems like the type of writer who might get invited to the Met Ball instead of the type who invests in embarrassing and hopelessly stereotypical hobbies like Ornithology3, and she is who Caroline Polacheck was writing about when she penned the song “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.”4 I was also (if you’ll RECALL) straight off the heels of finishing another time period novel, so I felt primed to continue my streak and pick up The Fraud right where The Portrait of A Lady and all its lilting cadences left off.
Unfortunately, where James’ Lady was strong in story and merely circumstantial in style, Smith’s Fraud is purely style, pastiched like gilding on the proverbial lily over a confusing and disjointed jumble of story.
What Smith crafted is, in its totality, a triumph of Dickensian mimicry.5 It is a novel in which the writer’s joy at pulling off something so stylistically strict; so much like a sonnet in its antiquity and constraints, seems to have surpassed or obliterated completely the necessities of plot. Perhaps, such an absence of fundamental considerations is not Smith’s fault alone. It seems to me that in most things, form does indeed fit function, and perhaps the form of the 19th Century novel simply lends itself with greater ease to a more glancing, summarial modality of storytelling. Perhaps the thinness of Smith’s plot and abbreviated interiority of her centralmost character has more to do with the demands of cramming an interesting, relatable story for our “modern audiences” inside the vessel of a Victorian novel, then it does with Smith’s (considerable!) talent as a writer.
Either way, my experience of reading The Fraud was kind of like being on a first date with someone who more or less has everything going for them, who is attractive and genial and a good conversationalist and has no unfortunate tendencies towards the waitstaff, but all you can think about is wanting to get the check and go home to your dog and some chocolate covered almonds you’ve been keeping in the freezer because, for whatever reason, you simply cannot or do not, connect. I was never able to gain traction in Smith’s novel; I never really knew what conclusion I was moving towards, or what each short vignette was adding up to, besides that they were indeed short and durably readable, if not entirely enjoyable.
Another reason for this intractability might be the apathy of Smith’s central character, Eliza Touchett. Mrs. Touchett is a woman who—veering towards a widowed sixty in Dickensian England—has long since resigned herself to occupying the corridors of invisibilia reserved for Women of a Certain Age. All of Eliza’s great and terrible moments happen offstage: the birth and death of her infant son; the departure and subsequent infidelity and finally, also death of her late husband; the slow descent into Yellow Wallpaper madness of her one true love—her cousin William Ainsworth’s6 wife and Eliza’s sometimes-lover, Anne Frances. Thusly, the pervasive tone and feel of Eliza’s narration and interiority is one of deep resignation. And with a central character who doesn’t care much at all about anything anymore, it is hard to engender more than a vague feeling of pathos in a readership.
There is, however, one thing Eliza comes to care deeply about—the sensational, highly publicized trial of Roger Tichborne, or a man claiming to be the noble-born and inheritance-having Roger Tichborne, who we come to learn is (maybe or maybe not!) the novel’s titular “Fraud.” Well, that’s not totally true—a nice trick of Smith’s novel is that everyone involved, for the most part, can be deemed a fraud in some way. Eliza, who is pretending not to be a good writer or queer; William, who is pretending to be a good writer; William’s most recent wife, who is pretending at a class she will simply never reach; and the occasional cameo by Charles Dickens, who is pretending to be (in Smith’s conception of him) an empathetic person, when in actuality, he is a parasitic sociopath. Whoopsie-daisy!
A choice that served only to confound the plotting of The Fraud, and which I perceive to be a grave error on Zadie Smith’s part7 was making Eliza’s and “Roger’s” last names so similar. Small, I know, but COME ON, help a girl OUT! Using the surnames “Tichborne” and “Touchett” in such repetitive close proximity in a Ye Olde English Novel is some Dostoevsky-type shit and I simply was not emotionally ready to have to remind myself so many times which multisyllabic T-name was which, especially when we’re already time and place jumping without clarity between chapters, and Charles Dickens is sometimes going by his real name and sometimes by “Charles Dickens,” and I’m hurtling through the sky from Newark Liberty International Airport to LAX on a Halloween night, Spirit Airlines flight during which someone has decided to smoke a pack of cigarettes in the bathroom right by the cockpit.8 It’s simply? Too much! Too hard! Unsubscribe!
Anyways! Smith’s novel had already burned through about two hundred-some-odd pages by the time we get to the titular9 Fraud’s trial, and the meat of Eliza’s character development. The iron to sharpen her iron appears in the form of Arthur Bogle, an elderly, stately Black man of Jamaicain providence, who provides the clearest and most convicted testimony that the man claiming to be Roger Tichborne is, indeed, THEE Roger Tichborne. Eliza is captivated by this self-possessed man and his mixed-race son, whose nobility of character—she thinks—only serves to highlight and further dignify their extreme poverty. Eliza finds herself enraptured by the idea of telling Bogle’s life story, which leads to a jarring P.O.V. change more than two thirds of the way through the novel, and right when Eliza’s story was just getting interesting. Ergo, we get neither Mr. Bogle’s nor Mrs. Touchett’s full story, and the coinciding of the two characters is never experienced as much more than a strained coincidence, orchestrated with far too much visible effort on the part of the novelist.
The ideas and modern-day parallels that Smith unearths through Bogle’s dual testimonies and Eliza’s relationship to the two Black men are important and timely, if not particularly subtle. It’s very clear that Smith is trying to draw our attention to the reality that “Fake News” is as old as the massively popular propagandizing practices of Yellow Journalism and Muckraking themselves; as deeply entrenched in our collective history as ol’ Mr. Gutenberg and his “No, This is The Right Version, Trust Me” Bible.
Smith’s trial of the maybe Roger Tichborne—which is, itself, “loosely” based on real events—is a clear allegory for the rise of Donald Trump and his unflappable fandom, a mirror image of our collective experience with the frustration of truth at the hands of the impassioned masses. In the end, it is Eliza’s (purposefully, I think, on Smith’s part) tokenistic obsession with both Bogles that yields the novel’s most salient points about Justice and Freedom, and to whom either is allowed to belong. And, if either can ever truly be given, or if the possession of life itself is, and should be, justification enough to ensure the nobility of living.
In the end, I largely credit the fact that Spirit Airlines has no televisions or reclining seats to my ability to finish this book. Though at times I found myself enjoying Smith’s cleverness, or appreciating her thematic skill, or even simply liking the way she writes (which I do!), I almost gave up multiple times throughout The Fraud, and I cannot say that I’m particularly happy I didn’t.
As I waited to de-plane on that fated Halloween night, stuck as I was with my fellow budget airline babies while we waited for the Air Marshall to come get the dude who lit up in the fore bathroom because he’s never heard of Nicorette, apparently, I was left with the feeling of being duped by Smith. Duped by the eleventh hour, surprise “twist” ending of her novel, by the multiple bait-and-switches and never fully justified turns of her characters and storytelling; by the dissatisfaction of not knowing for sure what was, or is, real, or who Eliza Touchett—whom I had just spent four hundred some odd pages and six hours in a metal tube with—really was.
Which was, perhaps, the whole point.
NORA’S RATING: 5/10. Turns out I am capable of disliking something that has a lot of hype and has captured the public’s popular consciousness, who knew! Feeling dangerous, feeling rebellious, feeling COOL.
READ THIS BOOK IF: You happen to be on the Spirit Airlines flight after me going from LAX - Newark, and you find the hardcover copy of The Fraud I left on board.10
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF: You like Zadie Smith A LOT, as I fear it might ruin her streak for you of thus far, excellent writing. Sorry! I’m SORRY. I really did want to like it! I AM SORRY!!!!!!!!!!
Besides Goodwill Hunting, I will always love that movie, he did good there.
He has given us so much.
Looking at you, Franzen.
Not really but also, really. Look at her book jacket picture if you don’t believe me.
Okay okay, I’ve only ever read The Christmas Carol, so I’m not nearly an expert, but I’ve read a lot of other books from that general PERIOD and I know I’m right on this score because like that judge and porno, I know [Dickensian Mimicry] when I see it.
BY MARRIAGE! IT’S OKAY GUYS BC ELIZA AND WILLIAM ALSO HAVE SOME BDSM SEX! RELAX!
(In my “humble” ((lol)) opinion as someone who has never written a novel nor yet accumulated a great readership in any capacity).
True story.
Tee hee!!!! Tit. :))))))))
I didn’t really do this. I lied. But I really did think HARD about it! The only thing that stopped me was my mom bought this book for me and wants to read it after me so I have to send it to her, otherwise it would’ve gone to the great re-gifter in the sky.
Your essays are wonderful! Please post some more.
I do recommend re-reading parts of The Fraud when you are middle-aged. Yes, it was a slog; I put it down many times . Eventually it helped me to imagine the pieces of the book arriving in serial form, maybe a month apart, in my mailbox. Maybe Zadie Smith allowed herself a choppiness and disjointedness in the structure and the plot, as if it were written serially with no chance to edit previous installments. Also, I read The Portrait of A Lady just after The Fraud and wondered whether Smith meant to give Eliza almost exactly the same last name that her aunt and cousin Ralph have? As for Isabel's miserable marriage, at least James did not kill her off and good old Henrietta seemed to believe in a future improvement in Isabel's lot. Hopefully not via Caspar.
You might like Irma Voth, by Miriam Toews , it is brilliant and funny and the best adolescent female character ever written. Also, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald. It is witty and mysterious and very odd. Very short too.
You’re my chocolate-covered treat; I’d much rather read this and keep the novel in the freezer.