The Duchess of Hysterical Realism: Zadie Smith
I review Zadie Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, and reflect on the status of hysterical realism.
Given the dreariness of our literary culture, it is probable that the name Zadie Smith means little to you. However, she is a big deal in the elite literary circles we have left. She’s also an author I’m fond of because she’s a bit of a stylistic descendant of David Foster Wallace, a personal favorite. Let me introduce you.
Zadie Smith
![Smith announcing the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award finalists in fiction Smith announcing the 2010 National Book Critics Circle award finalists in fiction](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa6a83a7a-8b0e-486e-a778-0665b41e7789_800x1000.jpeg)
Born in 1975 in Willesden, a suburb of London, Smith is the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, who divorced when she was a teenager (Her father was 30 years her mother’s senior). She changed her name from Sadie to Zadie at the age of 14, presumably as an assertion of independence and ambition of some kind. She studied English literature at Cambridge University, where she began writing her first novel, White Teeth, which was published in 2000 to critical acclaim and commercial success.
White Teeth Debut & Hysterical Realism
White Teeth is a sprawling, multigenerational saga that explores the lives of three families of different ethnic backgrounds in London, from the end of World War II to the turn of the millennium. It is a novel that combines realism and absurdity, humor and tragedy, history and pop culture, in a dazzling display of linguistic virtuosity and narrative inventiveness. White Teeth tends to be considered example A of hysterical realism (HR), a term coined by the renowned but old-fashioned critic James Wood to describe the prose style and convention of Smith and he compatriots. Wood intended the term to be pejorative, but it has been somewhat coopted. (The post-postmodern gang, despite some of the usual pettiness that besets intellectual types, has a streak of resilience or at least they did in the aughts.) In review of Smith’s debut novel, Wood argued that hysterical realism prioritizes vitality, often packaged as cleverness, at the expense of real insight into the human condition. It runs to the overly abstract and grows too ambitious in its aims. Because of these tendencies the default for HR authors is perpetual exaggeration, both elaborate and absurd. This doesmore to misrepresent than cut to the core of real human interiority - more show than substance, if you will.
Smith has expressed some sympathy for Wood’s critique. This is admirable in some respects, but also a bit predictable. Artists, especially secure and accomplished ones, often tend to look back with slight embarrassment on the work of their younger selves, and Smith authored White Teeth in her early 20s! So I don't necessarily take her agreement as an abandonment of HR. Smith also has defended the style that appears in her early novels. For instance, in a 2007 interview with The Guardian Smith opines on the value of HR:
People continue to manage this awesome trick of wrestling sentiment away from TV's colonization of all things soulful and human, and I would applaud all the youngish Americans—Franzen, Moody, Foster Wallace, Eggers, Moore for their (supposedly) small but, to me, significant triumphs. They work to keep both sides of the equation—brain and heart—present in their fiction. Even if you find them obtuse, they can rarely be accused of cliché…
Professional Success
Since White Teeth, Smith has written four more novels with another forthcoming this year: The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), Swing Time (2016), and The Fraud (Sept 2023). She has also published at least three collections of essays, Changing My Mind (2009), Feel Free (2018), and Intimations (2020); two collections of short stories, Martha and Hanwell (2005) and Grand Union (2019); and a play ‘The Wife of Willesden” (2021). Her work is often used as an exemplary model in creative writing workshops. She is currently a professor of creative writing at New York University. As should be abundantly clear, Smith’s career in letters has been long, prolific, and decorated, and it is still active!
The Autography Man
I've sadly neglected reading much Smith excepting some small selections and two of her novels. Earlier this year, I completed the second installment of my chronological journey through Smith’s novels, The Autograph Man. Hopefully, I finish the remainders soon! Nonetheless, I’ve collected some thoughts on HR and The Autograph Man.
Although maybe somewhat too generous, I think the publisher’s description puts it aptly, The Autograph Man is a "deeply funny existential tour around the hollow trappings of modernity: celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience." This sort of novel isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. It is concerned with abstractions about experience, identity, and art, specifically in a modern context; things that can sometimes seem trivial or disposable. Readers may ask, “Won't the latest technology just obviate these questions?” Plus, The Autograph Man shows little reticence about its commitment to triviality. It revels in the nullity of mediated, self-aware experience. It cartoonishly chases sincerity, while acknowledging its improbability.
This sort of knife-edge act of deferring to and defeating Influence (i.e. the anxiety of influence) and postmodernity ironically defaults to authorial style and wit. In other words, the only way to escape the trap of unoriginality in an age where ideas and creation occur everywhere all at once is personality; authorial voice is the nearest weapon at hand to make one at least appear distinct. I think Zadie Smith passes the test of having a distinct authorial voice. I'm under it's sway. She manages well enough to entrap me in her story despite the underwhelming nature of her lead's character and his doings.
Alex-Li Tandem is "a dreary blank, an empty centre" like the critic James Wood complained in his 2002 review, but I don't quite take it as the disappointment he does. Tandem is Smith's vehicle for lots of hilarity and dread. The kind that many digital natives and cultural mavens struggle with. This is what The Autograph Man modestly promises and delivers to readers.
I was somewhat surprised by the number of negative reviews of the second novel of vaunted Zadie Smith. I enjoyed White Teeth similarly to this work, though the former enjoyed a bit more verve and substance. But despite being a bit quieter, I felt this was an improvement in some ways. It's more reflective. Wood's review of The Autograph Man stands out to me because it manages to deliver criticism that seeming highlights compelling things. He labels Smith's second novel a disturbing mutant because she, a contemporary British author, has mind-melded with distinctly American know-it-all type writers. Wood laments that "the novel... bears the impress of American writers like Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, clever, nervy exhibitionists, IQs-with-i-Books, guys who, as Smith has put it, ‘know things’, writers with a gift for speedy cultural analysis, whose prose is choppy with interruption." This is a style I love so what does it matter that Smith is British? Isn’t trying to know things a path towards wisdom?I understand rolling one's eyes at that endless recycling or iteration of snappy pop culture references in ways common to postmodern American artists (e.g. Tarantino). But I think Wood is a bit ahead of the curve with this critique given this was only 2002. Even if it is warmed over PoMo flourishes, I think these flourishes resonate at the turn of 21st century and beyond.
And yes, Wood is right about some of the moral confusion in The Autograph Man, but I don't find this concerning. Smith was a young artist and hence questions of identity and purpose and their interaction with popular culture are salient then. Plus, the amorality and unrelenting cynicism compel a close look at the obsession with spectacle. Although Tandem's profession is a bit quaint (collecting and selling autographs) to today's readers, in some ways the democratization of celebrity in a fragmented cultural landscape have made the theme of the mediated self, a self without sincere grounding except in reference to cultural artifacts, more resonant. Like Wood says, "in a world of signs nothing is authentic." But in some ways, where can we turn to for real meaning except to our cultural artifacts, especially now? Of course, as history proceeds, there grows a traceable trajectory with recursions and devolutions (i.e. parody and decadence). But isn’t this still real, even if it is just thoughts brought into existence by language? Is raw real-life meaning and feeling only in the flesh and blood world?
But look at this, this purportedly insubstantial and second-rate Zadie Smith novel has prompted introspection. I think this is what we can hope for from contemporary literary fiction. That and some entertaining frivolity, which this one delivered. Some real bangers! Even if you don’t want to spend time reading the novel in full, please check out the section "The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi." I promise laughs.
Has Hysterical Realism's Bubble Popped?
We are certainly a long way from the peak of hysterical realism and its fellow travelers New Sincerity, Maximalism, and Metamodernism. The early aughts were a pre-emptive strike from DFW’s “ooglers” to stymie the imminent onslaught of endless super-stimulatory art and entertainment, especially the kind that's immediately and frictionlessly available: internet media, social media, streaming, short-form video reels, engagement algorithms, generative AI, etc.
However, I don't think we can ring the death knell for hysterical realism. The project to inter the problems provocatively posed by postmodernism is incomplete. Of course, some have fruitfully chosen to ignore it or pressed forward courageously (e.g. Cormac McCarthy), but I think many are still anxious about irony, parody, decadence, originality, etc. I am just not sure who is at the helm of this effort.
DFW is no longer with us. Franzen’s project appears to sit in parallel contained in some separate, lower stakes way. Eggers appears a bit broken by political realities. The others lack charismatic force or youthful vigor to carry a movement. And today’s young upstarts like Sally Rooney, Honor Levy, Emma Cline, Alexandra Kleeman, and Lauren Oyler appear more like casualties of technology than cogent and ambitious figures.
Smith is hysterical realism’s only hope. And Smith appears to have unfortunately tamed some of her youthful exuberance and trained her focus on more particular questions of identity, redoubling the mining of her mixed ethnic background for material. The caveat here is my reading journey is incomplete, blind to potential brilliance that may lurk on unread pages. I must read on. I hope you'll join me.
Reference:
James Wood Review "Fundamentally Goyish"