Expectations are high when you're a 25-year-old novelist with Cambridge credentials. Expectations are even higher when you're a twenty 25-year-old novelist with Cambridge credentials whose debut becomes a best-seller and dazzles critics and readers alike. Given these expectations, Zadie Smith's follow-up to 2000's wildly successful White Teeth, last year's Autograph Man had a lot to live up to. Critics and readers alike waited it with bated breath and an unspoken question in their minds: how exactly do you follow up a novel that became the basis of a BBC mini-series, received rave reviews on both sides of the Big Pond, and spent weeks on the New York Times' best-sellers list?
The Autograph Man is a bildungsroman for the twenty-first century, steeped in postmodernist irony. The titular character is Alex-Li Tandem, a half-Chinese, half-Jewish twenty-something who sells autographs by day and smokes pot by night. His world consists of his friends: a laid-back student of Kabbalah, a neurotic insurance salesman, a proselytizing rabbi and his girlfriend (an "African Princess" with a pacemaker and an endless supply of patience). Other important parts of Tandem's world include his half-finished treatise on goy-ishness and Jewery and his obsession with Kitty Alexander, an obscure forties actress whose autograph is his Holy Grail. Over the course of the novel, he seeks to better understand himself, from his attempts to recollect the events of a three-day acid trip to his struggles to reconcile his feelings towards his deceased father.
If you attempt to look for a plot, your head will explode. Smith is a fine novelist with numerous strengths, but mastery of narrative structure isn't one of them. The Autograph Man consists of a number of smartly written episodes, but they fail to form a cohesive whole. The strongest part of the novel is the prologue, an account of a fateful wrestling match written in the point of view of Alex's father, a caring but hapless man who loves his son but doesn't quite understand him. It's an affecting passage, but its biting intelligence and wit keep the possibility of maudlin sentimentalism at bay. Smith does an excellent job in setting up the basis for the novel here, establishing setting and fleshing out characters with deftness and steady assurance.
The rest of the novel doesn't live up to the promise of the prologue. It begins nicely with a reintroduction to Alex and his friends as adults, but it quickly degenerates into a sloppily organized series of arguments, epiphanies, and observations about everything from religious and ethnic identity to the superiority of movies over music. The adult Alex makes for a weak protagonist. Despite his numerous foibles and quirks, he comes off as bland. Perhaps his lack of personality is a literary conceit on Smith's part to further the criticism of celebrity and superficiality implicit in the novel. Nonetheless, such a conceit only works in the context of an academic reading.
Smith is clever. Anybody who calls Walter Benjamin a "wise guy" is exceedingly clever. Indeed, her primary strength lies in her sharply honed eye for the absurdity of life. She injects the novel with amusingly pithy commentary that gives the minutiae of everyday existence an unexpected dimension of humor and significance. Likewise, her secondary characters act both as loopy caricatures and multifaceted personalities. This paradoxical construction allows her to use them as effective vehicles for her finely tuned insights on culture and society.
Cleverness is a double-edged sword. The Autograph Man is acutely self-aware. A measure of self-awareness gives a novel character and marks its place in postmodernist literature. Excessive self-awareness results in pretension. The Jewish aspect, despite its supposed centrality to the characters and plot, often comes across as a contrivance, an element forced into parts of the novel simply for the sake of its presence. Likewise, the interspersion of random diagrams, jokes, lists, symbols, and thought bubbles is amusing in small doses but tiresome when it occurs with a marked degree of regularity.
Is The Autograph Man as good as White Teeth? No. A sophomore slump? No. For all of her intelligence and wit, Smith is still a neophyte in the world of literary fiction. Technique is an accessory for good writing, and good novelists acquire it over time. Talent is a necessity, and Smith has it in spades. Stephen King recently bemoaned the state of modern fiction as "dopey or dull" in an issue of Entertainment Weekly. While his claim isn't entirely without merit, it's not entirely true, either.
