Zadie Smith’s NW: the Novel at an ‘anxiety crossroads’?

• Main Author: Vanessa Guignery
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-10-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: contemporary British literature; deconstruction; metafiction; modernism; narration; NW
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/996

This paper proposes to examine Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) in the light of her essay ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, in which she explores two roads for novel writing: ‘lyrical realism’ and ‘constructive deconstruction’. In NW, Smith uses a range of narrative techniques that are indebted to realist, modernist and postmodernist traditions, and by analysing some of them, this paper aims to find out where Smith situates herself on the literary map in 2012, how she deals with the legacies of the past and what new lines she may be drawing for herself. More than forty years after David Lodge’s essay ‘The Novelist at the Crossroads’, one may wonder whether Smith finds herself at an ‘anxiety crossroads’, to quote her own expression. Her mixture of stream-of-consciousness technique, straightforward narrative and metafictional devices shows that she chooses neither the highway of the well-made novel nor the side road of downright deconstruction, but embraces several directions without trying to reconcile them.