In the Park with Zadie Smith: Celebrating the Arrival of The Fraud

Zadie Smith in the Park 

It’s a late summer Sunday in North West London and everyone is heading to the park.

Zadie Smith texts me and says I’ll find her on a striped rug opposite the café. We are meeting up before her first public event for The Park, later that afternoon at the Queens Park Book Festival, held in a large marquee tent beside the nearby bandstand.

Amidst crowds of local families I find Zadie on her rug, under a tree, reading a book on AI. (She always has a book or three on the go, and her tote bag is a kind of mobile library.) We talk about books, teenagers, politics, AI and of course The Fraud, her new novel which we are launching this week. 

Set in the Victorian age, which surrounds us in the form of Queen’s Park itself – developed in 1879 to host the annual Royal Agricultural Society Show – The Fraud is Zadie’s first historical novel. Though more accurately it is, as she says, ‘a contemporary novel about the 19th century’. The terrain of the book is the same ‘NW’ that readers will recognise from her previous novels, ‘just set a bit further back.’

Her brick-phone pings with a text from the festival bookshop. Would she come and sign copies of Weirdo, the delightful children’s book she wrote with husband Nick Laird? We collect our things and wander over, bumping into Nick on the way.

Actor Bill Nighy is standing by the book stall, immaculately suited, next to a giant display of copies of The Fraud, and greets Zadie warmly. Surprised, she asks what brings him to the park. ‘I have come to see you!’ he exclaims.

Signing completed we head to the green room to meet Alex Clarke, who will chair Zadie’s event, then on to the back of the marquee tent. Zadie hands me her bag for safekeeping, festival director Thomas announces the start of the event, and Zadie and Alex take the stage to loud applause from the sell-out crowd.

Sitting stage-side I am fascinated to hear how Zadie will talk about the novel in public for the first time. 

She begins by talking about the form – and particularly the need for it to work with the readers she has, rather than to mimic the long sentences and multiple semi-colons of Victorian literature. Though she did adopt one Victorian authors’ habit – that of sending chapters every couple of weeks, as she finished them, to fellow writers Daryl Pinckney and Devorah Baum; echoing the process under which Dickens and others wrote their fiction for the magazines of the day, in serial form.

‘There is very little that is made up in this novel,’ she says. The characters, the settings, the plotlines, the Tichborne Trial, the Hope Plantation – all are drawn from life. ‘My only job was to tell the truth.’ She compares the writing process to a jazz musician improvising around a familiar standard: ‘All the chords were there.’ 

As the title of her novel suggests, by referencing its opposite, this is a book about truth – ‘This is what happened’. But it is also a book about emotions and subjectivities. ‘The tragedy and comedy of all our lives is that we experience a collective, social life while trapped in our own flesh-cages’. One of Zadie’s innate skills as a novelist is indeed how she imagines these subjectivities for her characters, and weaves story from, in this case, history. 

‘We have such a narcissistic view of history!’ she exclaims at one point. We think of the Victorians as so narrow and proper, and yet in reality ‘Good luck finding a Victorian marriage with less then three people in it!’

A particular problem, she notes, is our modern tendency to apply the strictest moral standards to people in the past whose situations we have never ourselves experienced. Instead, history shows, ‘You don’t have to be perfect to be good – you just have to be available – to show up.’ Ending slavery – the deep theme of The Fraud – was ‘the work of hundreds of years, involving millions, both the enslaved and the free’.

Before we know it, it is question time and Zadie’s final thought about her writing process: ‘I try to treat my reader as an adult, to work with me on creating the novel’. Then we are back out into the late afternoon sun, amidst the Victorian trees, before making our way home – me west to Kensal Rise and Zadie east towards Kilburn, both along the streets of The Fraud.