NW by Zadie SmithThe Penguin Press, 2012

NW is about the intersecting/intertwined lives of four Londoners (two women and two men) who grew up on the same housing estate in the northwest part of the city. Leah and Natalie, who have been best friends since childhood (back when Natalie was called Keisha: she renamed herself when she left for university) are the ones we get to know the most about, partly because each of their stories tells us things about the other, but partly just because the sections about the book centered on them are longer/Smith chooses to focus on them. Felix, who works as a mechanic, used to do a lot of drugs but is trying to put that part of his past behind him. Nathan, meanwhile, is a homeless pimp: he went to school with Natalie and Keisha but things haven’t gone so well for him. There’s lots going on here with gender and race and class: Leah is white; Natalie and Felix and Nathan are black; all of them grew up poor and either moved up from poverty or didn’t, to varying degrees (Natalie is a barrister, and married to a banker whose mother comes from a well-off Italian family; they now own a house in the posher part of the area. Leah does admin work—distributing lottery funds to charities and community organizations and nonprofits; she’s married to a hairdresser, and they live in a rented council flat: nice, but nothing like Nat’s house.)

But what I liked most about this book wasn’t the plot or the themes (in addition to the ones mentioned above, NW also explores ideas of fate/destiny/luck/personal agency, identity and choice, and love and friendship) or even the characters: what I liked most was the style, which is shifting and bold and playful. In the first section of the book, centered on Leah, the narrative is all present-tense, and leans toward stream of consciousness; the second section (centered on Felix) is more of a standard “novelistic” style. Natalie’s section is made of 184 numbered and titled vignettes, ranging in length from just a sentence to a few pages, and then Nathan’s section is, again, more like Felix’s. Throughout, there’s a lot of dialogue, which is always sharp and often funny and always reads as plausible speech: early in the book, Leah is described as “as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their families, or their countries. She knows the way people speak around here, that fuckin, around here, is only a rhythm in a sentence” (6). Smith knows the way people speak, too, and the rhythms of the dialogue are one of this book’s great pleasures. And oh, the playfulness: one of the vignettes in Natalie’s section is called “Some Answers” and is a childhood list of the answers of both Keisha and Leah to a questionnaire (the questions aren’t given but are clear enough from the answers, e.g. Leah’s answer to one is “Keisha Blake” and Keisha’s answer to that one is “Leah Hanwell”). There’s a vignette that’s a dinner menu, and another that’s a chat transcript, typos and all. There’s one chapter in Leah’s section that’s written as walking directions, in the style of Google Maps, from one street in northwest London to another a few miles away; that chapter is followed by a description of the sights and sounds and smells of that walk, which includes this passage (I love the exuberance of it):

Sweet stink of the hookah, couscous, kebab, exhaust fumes of a bus deadlock. 98, 16, 32, standing room only—quicker to walk […] Polish paper, Turkish paper, Arabic, Irish, French, Russian, Spanish, News of the World. Unlock your (stolen) phone, buy a battery pack, a lighter pack, a perfume pack, sunglasses, three for a fiver, a life-size porcelain tiger, gold taps. Casino! Everybody believes in destiny. Everybody. It was meant to be. It was just not meant to be. Deal or no deal? TV screens in the TV shop. TV cable, computer cable, audiovisual cables, I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken. Everybody. Bank of Iraq, Bank of Egypt, Bank of Libya. Empty cabs on account of the sunshine. Boom-boxes just because. Lone Italian, loafers, lost, looking for Mayfair. (42)