In ‘The Fraud,’ Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction

Is there anything worse than a novel? Is there anyone more vain, more laughable, more exploitative yet morally self-serious than the novelist? Or, as the protagonist of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel puts it: “ ‘Oh what does it matter what that man thinks of anything? He’s a novelist!’ Without meaning to, she had spoken in the same tone with which one might say He’s a child.”

The Fraud opens with an uneasy meeting on a novelist’s doorstep in 19th-century London. A “filthy boy” stands at the entrance to a respectable home in Tunbridge Wells, face-to-face with a formidable, black-haired Scottish woman. She is Eliza Touchet, the cousin of William Ainsworth, the novelist, and she has called the boy to fix a crater that has opened up in the house. The second-floor library has caved in under the weight of an absurd number of books, dumping plaster and volumes of British history all over the downstairs parlor.

Inspecting the damage, the boy is disapproving: “The sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.” When Eliza readily agrees, the boy feels a flicker of anxiety. “Was she laughing at him? Perhaps ‘literature’ was the wrong word. Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong.” He says no more and kneels to measure the size of the hole.

The metaphor is not subtle. This will be a book about the dead weight of literature; the saggy, impractical, possibly elitist enterprise of revering it; the ambivalences and frustrations involved in making it; the embarrassing excess of it all. This will also be a novel about the fear of using the “wrong word,” or the right word the wrong way, and what happens when that fear curdles into resentment.

These are topics of the moment, at least in the world of literary criticism. “Siri, what was the novel?” the New York Times critic Dwight Garner asked in a recent review “advancing an argument that’s been plausibly made for centuries: that literature is dead.” (Garner states that Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, was probably the last novel that “mattered.”) Smith, a literary critic herself, asked, “Do we know what fiction was?” in an essay for The New York Review of Books in 2019, wondering how viable the enterprise remains. The Fraud poses this question in the contested genre itself.

Eliza Touchet, as it happens, wasn’t making fun of the boy—she’s revolted by the pursuit of literature herself. Since being widowed in her early 20s, she has functioned as factotum and housekeeper for her writer cousin, originally helping his wife, Frances, care for their children whenever he had the itch to run off to Europe to “see beauty and write.” After Frances died, Eliza moved in to help finish raising the children, and she has become Ainsworth’s right hand: his first reader, his lover, the hostess of the literary salons he throws for his friends Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Cruikshank, and so forth. Ainsworth, whose career thrived during his younger years, is charming and prolific, but also conceited, out of touch, and a mediocre talent. By the time the ceiling caves in, he’s a has-been in denial, churning out historical fiction—a genre Eliza considers regrettable—that no one wants to read.

Eliza sits down to comment on Ainsworth’s latest manuscript, which is as she expects it to be: boring, badly written, and completely unoriginal. “Everything had been used before or was lifted from life … From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.” Ainsworth, anxious, demands to know what she thinks. Eliza declares it a triumph.

Both Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real people—William Ainsworth was a popular novelist of the Victorian era, more successful than even his friend Dickens in their early careers. His work has been largely forgotten, and very little is known about his cousin by marriage, Eliza Touchet, whom Smith adopts as the protagonist for this book. In other words, The Fraud is historical fiction, the regrettable genre. There are echoes of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch Eliza admires. The obsession with social mores and manners, alongside extended scenes of drawing-room gossip, recalls Jane Austen. This is not merely a novel; it is a pastiche of the Great English Novels. (This is a familiar feature in Smith’s fiction: On Beauty was a riff on E. M. Forster’s Howards End ; NW is in fairly explicit dialogue with the work of Virginia Woolf.)

Presiding over it all is the specter of Dickens. In the world of The Fraud, Dickens’s ascension to the role of Great Novelist is a thorn in Ainsworth’s side. Eliza objects to Dickens on ethical grounds: Though he is renowned as a kind of genius-saint, credited with surpassing sympathy for the plight of the working man, Eliza knows him to be something closer to a vulture—or a pickpocket. He and Ainsworth hang around the working poor not out of any humanitarian impulse but in search of material. They want to appropriate their language and sell it to the middle class as entertainment. “Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life. What a terrible business,” she thinks. “At least William did it clumsily, with benign incompetence. Whereas his friend Charles had done it like a master—like an actor. That was precisely what was so dangerous about him.”

Smith herself wrestles, as she recently wrote in a New Yorker essay, with the legacy of Dickens’s mark on the genre. Dickens adapted the novel into a mode of social commentary, which transformed it into a political tool—and elevated the novelist to a new moral and political stature. He didn’t only write great stories; he critiqued the poverty, hypocrisy, greed, and inhumanity of British society. He did what novelists today are under pressure to do: He was brilliantly entertaining, incisively political, wildly best-selling, and world-changing.

But are novelists effective or reliable enough to be tasked with representing the political and social realities around them? Smith seems unsure. She called fiction “our indefensible art” in her 2019 essay about the genre’s purposes and methods, wading into the controversy over writers inhabiting subjective positions different from their own—white American women writing Mexican-refugee characters, say, an example that soon stirred debate. Is this appropriation and parasitism, or is it imaginative empathy? “Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for containment? I think we can make both cases.” Either way, Smith argues, occupying other consciousnesses is inescapable for the novelist. She recalls seeing, when she was young, a cartoon of Charles Dickens:

Portrayed this way, the novelist is not just an individual but a chorus of humanity, many distinct selves held within and expressed by a single mind. Smith’s understanding of herself as a writer is related to a desire to air “all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my ‘own voice’ indistinct.” This is a lovely notion of what fiction can be: an art form in which the self operates as a gateway into a realm of other selves, enabled by “a kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? I wonder. Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels?”

This conception of fiction also suggests that the novel is inescapably a kind of self-portraiture, one that may contain insights about society and contemporary politics and ideology and all the rest, but in a terribly limited way. What Dickens is doing in a work like Oliver Twist, Eliza insists, isn’t benevolent fabrication or ethical social commentary; he’s merely reflecting his own obsessions, desires, ego. These conflicting truths happen to coexist, Smith suggests: The novelist is ideally expansive beyond the self; the novelist is always blinkered by the self. Whether the work is defensible has less to do with this double bind than with the writing itself, she argues. “Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain type of sentence … If the sentences don’t speak to me, nothing else will.”

The central irony of The Fraud is that the professional novelist writes bad sentences and ignores the greatest plot of the age. Ainsworth works away on his historical novels while London raptly follows the Tichborne trial. The trial (a real sensation in the early 1870s) features a man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. The heir, Roger Tichborne, was supposed to have disappeared at sea as a 25-year-old; now, 10 years later, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, has appeared in England claiming to be Roger. Most of the family insists that he’s an impostor, and not a very good one. The Claimant, as he is called, bears little resemblance to Roger Tichborne. He doesn’t recognize family members. He doesn’t speak any French, which was Roger Tichborne’s first language. And so on.

Still, the trial becomes a flash point for social tensions. The working classes take to the Claimant, seeing him as a symbol of their own social and economic oppression. The educated classes and aristocracy regard him as a fraud, a laughingstock, and a threat. The divide surfaces in the Ainsworth household as well. Ainsworth’s new and very young bride, Sarah, his former maid whom he impregnated, is a passionate fan of the Claimant. Ainsworth and Eliza consider him ridiculous. Still, Eliza agrees to accompany Sarah to watch the trial.

There, she is entranced by Andrew Bogle, the formerly enslaved Jamaican man who served Roger Tichborne’s father and insists that the Claimant is the real heir. Even before Eliza hears him speak, Bogle’s posture and demeanor inspire in her a new kind of awareness, along with questions. She wants to know his story. She wants, in spite of herself, to write about him. Against her better judgment, she begins working on a novel.

“The Fraud” is the title of the manuscript that Eliza embarks on as she attends the trial, and putatively it refers to the figure at the center of that case, though of course—wink!—the book has any number of frauds worth laying bare or laughing at. There is Ainsworth, still parading as a literary titan. Dickens instrumentalizes the people he is beloved for humanizing. Eliza herself is a fraud of many descriptions: a woman with an unorthodox sexual history (she has carried on affairs with both Ainsworth, whom she dominates sexually, and his first wife, whom she loved) masked as an upright Catholic spinster; a woman who scorns novelists and yet finds herself becoming one in secret.

Smith positions language as the instrument by which all of this fraud is committed. Language is a commodity, a weapon, and a disguise. Sarah cosplays at being a lady of highborn status by abandoning the vernacular of her class and using the word naturally as much as possible. Unfortunately, she can’t remember when to pronounce her H’s. She has no chance: She will never pass.

Smith has long been fascinated by, and is expertly attuned to, the authority and status conferred on those who can wield language entertainingly or persuasively. This is the novelist’s prowess—and the politician’s and the swindler’s. Philosophically, she seems uneasy about the indistinct boundary between the person who uses words to make art and the one who uses words to manipulate others for power. (Is there a difference?) This anxiety plays out in every corner of the novel.

The Claimant himself is suspected of lying because he speaks with a cockney accent, not with the elevated inflections of the Tichbornes. One of the primary debates surrounding the trial is how great a linguistic transformation is possible—a proxy for a more foundational cultural debate happening in Great Britain about who gets to decide what class you belong to or can rise to. You or the state? You or society? How would you need to sound—what words would you need to say—to be believed?

Smith also dwells on what it means to be a poor stylist, showcasing Ainsworth’s hilariously bad sentences as evidence of an aesthetic and intellectual deficiency but also a moral one. “He was besotted with his project, especially the ‘flash songs,’ sung by the criminal and cockney underworld characters, and written in the ‘cant’ slang he had picked up somewhere,” Eliza notes. Where? she asks him. He stole it from someone else’s memoir.

Eliza, who functions in part as an avatar for Smith’s ideas and concerns as a novelist, is initially set up as Ainsworth’s foil—the true novelist, preoccupied with the problem of interiority, and the challenge of genuinely accessing it in others. “What world did they live in, and what unknown and perhaps unknowable mental landscape formed it?” she wonders at the sight of “strange strangers” as she walks down the street. “Could it be deciphered? Guessed at? What can we know of other people?”

If this sounds a little sophomoric, that’s because Eliza’s moral imagination and curiosity are only barely more sophisticated than Ainsworth’s. Despite the revelation that she—a woman who feels herself a social outsider—might share a deep sensibility with someone like Bogle, she is ill-equipped to perceive his full humanity or subjectivity, a fact that becomes clear as The Fraud progresses. She doesn’t even take seriously the humanity of the other woman she lives with, Sarah, whom she dismisses as a vulgar idiot until, finally, Sarah demands her dignity: “ ‘No, you’ll let me speak,’ said Sarah, with a new authority. ‘I say: I know what you think of me. But where I’ve come from you can’t imagine.’ ”

Over and over, The Fraud insists on the duty of the novelist to deeply imagine the other—a project that may be doomed to fail but remains worth attempting. Smith was a convincing mouthpiece for this argument in The New York Review of Books not simply because she’s a persuasive critic but because she has made a career writing novels that do this well. White Teeth, whether or not you agree that it’s the last novel that mattered, garnered early fame for Smith precisely because of the kaleidoscopic (somewhat Dickensian) array of humanity she captured in her characters. Through her subsequent fiction, especially her novel Swing Time and her story collection Grand Union, this has remained a strength of Smith’s.

And yet her characters this time around—Eliza, Ainsworth, Sarah, and the rest—feel more like archetypes than like people. They do not come alive in the sentences, many of which read like wooden imitation (or unsteady satire) of 19th-century literary argot. The Fraud works perhaps better as a meta-novel, an allegory that advances ideas about the novel, than as a novel itself. It doesn’t quite offer the pleasure of sinking into the consciousness of another person, or even, despite the Victorian particulars, into the texture of a different place and time. The book explicitly signals that this would be a desired effect: In one scene, a younger Eliza looks into a stereoscope that shows three-dimensional images of Ceylon. She’s dismissive at first. Why invent a device for seeing the world in three dimensions when you can just look at the world with your own eyes, right in front of you?

She is immersed. She is beyond herself. This is what a novel can do. This is what The Fraud does not quite do, perhaps because—although the book, at more than 450 pages, is long—Smith is trying to deliver so much else: a rendering of London culture in the 19th century, a commentary on the recently abolished British colonial slave trade, a dramatization of a years-long court case, a Victorian BDSM queer romance. Smith is testing just how much the form can convey about the machinations of empire, gender, creativity, self-determination, and power—and how much the form can convey about itself. The weight of fictional ambition flattens her characters. The book seems, in moments, like a contest between Smith the novelist and Smith the critic, and the critic proves stronger.

Eliza herself acts from motives that are left vague. What drives her, for example, to write? How does she understand what she’s doing as she ventures into the creative and ethical territories she has disparaged others for treading on? What would artistic success in this form look like to her? More than once, I puzzled over what she wanted. But then, maybe Eliza doesn’t fully know what she wants, or why she does what she does. We are mysteries to ourselves, first and foremost—even, or especially, novelists.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction.”