what i'm reading: two by two favourite authors: part two: zadie smith's the fraud

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I recently read novels by two of my favourite authors, Roddy Doyle and Zadie Smith. I wrote about The Women Behind the Door here. Here's the second part: The Fraud.

A writer of vast and diverse talents

The Fraud is technically historical fiction, but this is Zadie Smith, so it's unlike any historical novel you've ever read. Whether or not you enjoy historical fiction, set aside your ideas about the genre before diving in to this gem.

I've read all but one of Smith's novels, and some of her nonfiction, and I plan to fill in what I've missed. She's an ambitious writer who has done a lot of different things. And like any artist who experiments with different forms, the outcomes can be uneven. (The exception to this is Colson Whitehead. How can he be so good at everything he tries??) I don't love everything Smith has written, but I love a lot of it, and for the rest, I want to come along for the ride. 

In this case, for me, Smith knocks it out of the park.

Who is the fraud? (Who isn't?)

The Fraud takes place in Victorian London, and focuses on three situations.

A sensational trial is underway: the Tichborne Claimant. After the heir to the Tichborne estate (presumably) died in a shipwreck, an Australian butcher came forward claiming to be Sir Tichborne. Despite all evidence that he was a charlatan and a fraud, a sizeable chunk of the British public loved and believed him. This is the most obvious reading of the book's title.

We also meet the life and times of a minor Victorian writer, a contemporary of Dickens and Thackery, now forgotten: William Harrison Ainsworth. We see most of the action from the point of view of Ainsworth's cousin and sometime lover, Eliza Touchet. Eliza, in Victorian parlance, is a widow, forever referred to as "Mrs. Touchet". She is also an intelligent woman, with a restless hunger for knowledge, dissatisfied with the tiny box that society allows her to live in. Mrs. Touchet has hidden identities that she cannot name even to herself, as they are well outside social norms of the time.

And there is Bogle: a formerly enslaved Jamaican man, who inexplicably champions the Tichborne Claimant, and who lends gravitas and credibility to the Claimant's cause. Through Bogle, we explore the lives of generations of enslaved Africans who came to be first Jamaican, then British.

Each of these people -- the Tichborne Claimaint, Ainsworth, Mrs. Touchet, and Bogle -- are all, in some sense, frauds. The Tichborne Claimaint is perpetrating a kind of giant magic trick on the public. Ainsworth is a fraud but doesn't realize it. Mrs. Touchet lives a fraudulent life, because she has to. Bogle's motives are more obscure. 

Keep reading, and you'll gain a sense that absolutely everyone is a fraud in some sense. The current Mrs. Ainsworth, who married "above her station". Charles Dickens, perhaps a fictional version of the great writer -- or perhaps a more authentic but hidden version. And on and on. Leading us to question what it would mean to live an authentic life.

The great fraud of our own times

The Fraud works on an entirely different level, too: it maps to the current political situation: the fraud who now lives in the White House.

The Tichborne case and the pro-Tichborne public echo the Orange Guy and the MAGA movement in ways that are both obvious and subtle -- and entirely clever and humorous. There are anti-vaxxers (who certainly existed back then), and outlandish conspiracy theories that contradict themselves. There is an extreme distrust of society's institutions, coupled with a blind loyalty to people of great power, incomprehensible to the intelligent and well-informed. And there is, above all, an inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Everything about the Tichborne Claimant trial and the community -- the cult -- that formed around it can be read as current and topical.

And there's more

Many critics have written about The Fraud as a meta-novel: a novel about novelists, about Smith and her profession, and about us, the reading public. Here's a good example from The Atlantic.

It is certainly that. There are plenty of postmodern, self-referential moments that loop around themselves, where you're reading about yourself, what you are actually doing at the moment: reading a novel about a novel. 

But I think the critics who read this ambitious book primarily as a meta-novel are focusing on the wrong thing. There is just so much going on. 

I will include one caution: The Fraud might be a bit difficult to get into at first, as it's written in a Victorian style. Or is it a faux Victorian style? Is the style a fraud?

Give it a chance, it's worth it.