With “Fraud”, the British author Zadie Smith has written a funny epic about a liar who stirs up British society in the 19th century. She never actually wanted to write a historical novel.
It’s a disaster. Housekeeper Mrs. Eliza Touchet stands on the second floor of her London mansion in front of a crater that was once her library. The historical hams about the British royal family were too heavy for the ailing soil. They now lie, buried under mountains of rubble, down in the drawing room. Or resting “in the arms of the library’s own Persian carpet, which had sagged through the hole and now hung in the air as a huge, swinging thing like an upside-down hot air balloon.”