Zadie Smith and Nick Laird
Quite by chance I have just read two books, one written by the wife, and one by the husband.
The name Zadie Smith was enough for me to grab her book from the shelf in the library. I didn't need to read the blurbs. The other was a novel by Nick Laird--a name
unknown to me, but what caught my eye were praiseworthy blurbs by Martin Amis, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. So I checked out the book, entitled "Modern Gods."
Only when I googled Nick Laird did I discover that he is the husband of Zadie Smith and a poet who has won multiple awards. He was born in Ulster, educated at Cambridge and Harvard, and teaches creative writing at New York University. And 'creative' is certainly an adjective that can be applied to "Modern Gods."
I went to the acknowledgements in each novel. Here is Laird's--"As always thanks to Zadie for everything." And Smith's--"Nick, Kit, Hal--with love and gratitude." Kit and Hal are their two children.
"Swing Time" is the title of the Zadie Smith novel. A first person narrator is the daughter of a Jamaican mother and a white Londoner, and her life is closely linked in a somewhat obsessive relationship with Tracey, a near neighbor in a North London council estate. Tracey's father is Jamaican and her mother a slatternly white woman. The narrator moves with Tracey through childhood and adolescence, both going to dancing classes, where Tracey wins lots of prizes: and as their lives develop in different ways they are drawn together again and again. With Tracey's dancing career over, she is now the single mother of children by different fathers. And the narrator's relationship with her mother, who works her way from an elected position on the local council to MP, is also a major theme as the novel progresses.
The narrator (who is given no name) becomes a personal assistant to a billionaire singing star--just known as Aimee--and much of the novel is devoted to Aimee's establishment of a school for girls in a West African village. Aimee is a Madonna or Oprah figure.
Zadie Smith is a terrific writer and I would certainly recommend the book. My only criticism--saying, perhaps more about me than Smith--is that there is too much detailed and lengthy attention paid to the West African scene, and--yes--I started skipping. The book is 450 pages. I sometimes wonder if in a book of this length the writer has no feel for how a reader's interest might be flagging--in spite of the quality of the writing, and whether an editor would ever dare to say to the author, "Zadie, this needs cutting."
Nick Laird's novel is shorter by a hundred pages. It deals with a family in Ulster, with the historic backdrop of "the troubles," now supposedly sorted by the Good Friday Agreement. There are the elderly parents, she with a growing tumor, he increasingly tetchy. There are the three children, two of whom face life changing situations. Alison, divorced with two small children, is to marry Stephen, a man with a mysterious past that turns out--after the marriage--to be much worse than expected. Liz, an anthropologist teaching in New York, who finds her boy-friend in bed with another male and leaves New York to go--via Ulster for Alison's wedding--to New Ulster, an island off the Coast of Papua new Guinea, where she is to work as a presenter for a BBC documentary on a primitive new religion that has sprung up, led by a charismatic middle-aged woman who is clearly delusional. Strangely, I had the same reaction (it must be me) to Liz's sojourn in the primitive society of New Ulster as with Smith's West African scenes--just too much. I felt a better balance was needed between Alison's problems (and perhaps also with the scant detail of the life of the brother, Kennedy) and the macabre adventures of Liz in New Ulster.
But--to be clear--I do recommend these two novels for the quality of the writing and the exploration of the minds of the characters, even if one does end up with a bit of skipping...