Novel Lessons In NW

Abstract:

With a mixture of structural homage and ironic reference, Zadie Smith’s fragmentary, polyvocal novel NW (2012) cannily adapts the imperatives of the classic bildungsroman from a nineteenth-century national-industrial context to a contemporary global frame. Within NW’s four main narratives of formation, education and individual ambition serve not to cultivate and fulfill, but to frustrate, fail, or fragment. As a counterpoint to its negative assessment of education and linear progression, however, NW’s thorough manipulation of the logic of formation highlights the novel’s capacity to reorient readers’ modes of attention and empathy as conditioned by alterity, to use Dorothy Hale’s term. Drawing on Smith’s essays, I suggest that NW’s experimental novelistic techniques present alternative forms of education for the reader: a range of indeterminate and uncertain “lessons,” dependent on singular encounters with the text.