On First Novels

I just finished reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I tend to wait for the bandwagon to pass before picking up books. Too much pressure. Everyone talking about the same novel, everyone saying clever things about the cleverness of books, arh! I only like to read because I like words and funky sentence structure and imagery posing as prose and how a bunch of letters on a page can make me weep and laugh and desire. That’s it, really. So, I don’t know much about the structural de-constructionism or whatever the fuck that was going on in the book that got Smith short-listed for the Booker last year, but I love the woman to death.

Gonz introduced me to this thing about First Novels some time ago. The thing about First Novels is that they are almost always brilliant. You get a sense of the writer trying to search for their own literary identity, they play with their language, they are a teensy bit pretentious, the books are young and idealistic and it makes for optimal Poojie-reading pleasure. Due to my bias towards The First Novel and my declaration of undying love for White Teeth (The Perfect Novel, in my very unqualified opinion), I will never be able to judge a Zadie Smith novel in isolation, ever. So, unfortunately, my review of On Beauty goes something like this: "Better than Autograph Man, not quite as good as White Teeth." This is an entirely shite way to judge any novel.

That said, Smith is a genius when it comes to peeling off layers of each character until they bare-boned and naked (often, literally) and exposed for who they really are. And who are we all really, except people trying to make sense of the world around us and how we fit within it. And what is identity except a series of terminology we neatly collect and categorise as we go through life.