Book #41: The Fraud by Zadie Smith
The Fraud by Zadie Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a book I intended to read for a while; its different from Zadie Smith's previous novels, as it is a historical story, set in the 19th Century, and based on real-life events.
The central character is Eliza Touchet, who is the cousin to William Harrison Ainsworth, a terrible author. She seems to act as a confidante to him at times, although she seems to mostly pay him lip service; for example, early on she tells him that a particularly bad draft looks fine. Zadie Smith explains in her afterword that she took some liberties with facts with Eliza, who died in 1869, but survives a lot longer in the story.
There is a lot going on in the book, but one of the main plot threads involves a real-life court case that I would need to read up more about, where a man (referred to as "the claimant") claims to be the heir to the Titchborne family inheritance.
This book felt denser and more difficult than Zadie Smith's previous novels; there is a lot of detail in this book, and it mostly describes what Eliza is thinking and everything that she does. The writing style put me in mind of Charles Dickens, who appears throughout the novel, as do some other 19th Century authors including William Makepeace Thackeray.
Written by some other authors, I probably would have written off this book, but I really enjoyed Zadie Smith's prose, even though at times I was struggling to follow events. I enjoyed the descriptions of 19th Century London, and all the subtle social commentary, some of which the position of women in society at the time (at one point a character claims that women shouldn't spend their time reading). There is also some conspicuous commentary on race and issues of slavery that would have been prevalent in the time at which the book is set. The best part of the novel comes when Eliza interviews Andrew Bogle, a former slave who tells the story about his family and how he came to be in London, having been transported from the sugar-cane plantations of Jamaica.
The pace of the book was quite slow moving, so I felt that I had to be patient with this one, but I was glad that I stuck with it. I loved the fact that the novel had an ambiguous meaning; for example, the fraud of the title could have referred to the claimant, William for trying to make himself appear to be a good writer, or even to Eliza, who at one point questions whether she herself is a fraud.
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