The Brooklyn Rail

The title seems straightforward enough, but once you get into the story you wonder⎯which fraud? The latest from Zadie Smith, her first historical novel and latest humdinger, turns up one likely suspect after another. The story first blooms in the hothouse of the British novel, its late-nineteenth-Century heyday, and those scenes of course feature the occasional genuine article. Charles Dickens, for instance, looms throughout, though he’s only a minor character. Still, around these salons as at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the gold is surrounded by dross.

Nor are the frauds solely literary, in Smith’s imagining; most of the novel’s second half is spent in British courthouses, at political rallies, or, most memorably, on the Jamaican sugar plantations. In all these settings, the action turns dangerous, often tragic. The Caribbean materials take place both before and after the 1834 abolition of slavery, but once England jettisons the “deplorable institution,” for the workers things get worse, if anything. In these chapters the author’s formidable wit is laced with acid. The cane fields remain in white hands, any protest is viciously put down, and freedom proves just another fraud.

Long and short, the pejorative applies everywhere. This goes as well for the one character sharp enough to spot fraudulence in all its variety, the central consciousness Eliza Touchet. This woman is taken from history, like most of the cast, though Smith admits, in a swift final summing-up, that her Eliza is “partly phantasmagoric.” That’s putting it mildly, and I’ve nothing but gratitude for the author’s inventions. She’s peopled her novels with extraordinary women, pairs in some cases, like Kiki Belsey and her daughter Zora in On Beauty, and I daresay Eliza ranks with any of them.

Her story begins in catastrophe, her baby snatched away by a cad of a husband, then both succumbing to scarlet fever, all in a time and place where “a mother had no more rights… than a slave.” Eliza is left with only one recourse: a budding novelist (in time he’ll publish over 40) and cousin by marriage, William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882). A long shot, but the man comes through wonderfully; anyway, he could use the help. Ainsworth has a young family of his own, and in their midst the young widow regains “this warm human sacred business she had almost forgotten existed.”

Also, some business less than sacred. The new housekeeper isn’t a blood relation, and her savior has always carried a torch. The evening he seizes her in a “long and queer” embrace, too, Eliza surprises herself, responding in kind, almost “a vampire, feeding.” Later, their embraces turn still queerer, there’s a riding crop involved, and yet before Ainsworth made his move, Eliza had found true love⎯as far from fraud as she’ll ever get. This was in the arms of the man’s wife: “Like two fingers penetrating a flower… miraculously warm and wet, pulsing, made of flesh…”

A remarkable creation, Eliza, and her twinned affairs alone seem epic material. In this novel, however, both are dealt with before we’re a tenth of the way through. Indeed, from the first, Ainsworth’s wife is no longer around. In the narrative present, she’s been dead for decades, and the novelist and his “cousin” are too old for shenanigans. To Eliza, these years shape time strangely: “It could twist and bend until the past met the present, and vice versa.” To Smith, the setting allows her to wheel from youth to decay and back, at every turn posing fresh questions about identity and freedom.

In Ainsworth’s case, the cycle always ends in a letdown. As a writer he’s a natural, dashing off “twenty pages in an afternoon,” and on top of that born to privilege. Though the father of three small children, he can take off to Italy for months on end, simply because “he is almost 25 and must see beauty and write.” Eliza and the wife can handle household affairs⎯pun intended. Besides, once he’s back home, oblivious to the women’s “avoidant dance,” the novelist comes into his fifteen minutes of fame. Early successes like Jack Sheppard (1839) have younger talents like Dickens and Thackeray tugging his coat, and Ainsworth loves to party, especially with Eliza around as token feminine and constant gofer. But a heap of books can’t make up for a miniscule talent, and the man’s star soon begins to fall. The death of Dickens, in 1870, doesn’t just deprive the protagonists of an “old friend;” it underscores how one writer soared and the other flopped.

But then, that’s ordinary bad news, when hopes and dreams prove a fraud. This novel dramatizes far worse, even back during halcyon days. Back when an Ainsworth invitation still means something, the talk around the table always includes disturbing news, some fresh injustice in-country, or some bloody colonial uprising. Smith’s ripples of plot, that is, also lap at different social strata, across England and its colonies. The horrors of the cane plantations, for instance, come to light only after Eliza’s drawn closer to the British working poor, hardly better off than slaves. Such discoveries have a bearing on the literary storyline too, since the poor were always a preoccupation for Dickens, whereas Ainsworth largely ignored them. The damage this did his fiction provides some of the funniest passages in The Fraud⎯perhaps the closest reading the man’s enjoyed in over a hundred years.

Meanwhile, more or less inevitably, the sensitive Eliza graduates from her cousin’s amanuensis to filling notebooks of her own. She’s something of a court reporter and something more as well, following “the saga of the Tichborne Claimant.”

A wrangle over inheritance⎯is someone family or fraud?⎯ the case has “everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity… High Court judges, snobbery, exotic locations….” The elements hold some interest for Eliza, but they fascinate William’s new wife Sarah. Much younger and born to the hardscrabble, Sarah was the maid, but her employer got careless, they now have a daughter, and once again Ainsworth proved clueless but, shall we say, upright.

The new wife seems a cliché, and what’s more she bubbles over with prejudices to rival a MAGA acolyte: “all the bigwigs, with their secret societies … all too busy answering to the Hebrews ….” On the other hand, she’s never at a loss for a retort, so refreshingly cantankerous as to shake Eliza out of creeping dowdiness. In a household grown fusty, Sarah’s a potent foil, and altogether another spectacular Smith woman, though seen solely from the outside. It helps, too, that her backdrop is often riotous. When Eliza witnesses wild demonstrations or courthouse scenes, when she tours the London slums, it’s thanks to Sarah. Most importantly, the Tichborne case enables Eliza to meet and interview the former Jamaican house slave, “a very black man… not unlike a parson, in fact, everything about him being neat, calculated, black …,” known as Bogle.

This too is a historical figure; Smith tells us that any time Bogle gets quoted in court, it’s from the transcripts. For her imagined interview she allows the voice to expand marvelously, creating a hundred-page novel within the novel, an odyssey from Africa to Jamaica to England. By that point Eliza has grown more savvy about the powerless, one magnificent scene even has her schooled by enslaved children, and so what Bogle shares achieves a fine-grained subtlety, a profound outrage, beyond anything this master storyteller has brought off before. Quotation can’t convey the impact, the strategies and agonies of the underclass require context, but I can say that at the end, The Fraud abandons all its conniving for a piercing vision of human connection and warmth:

That exotic island of [Eliza’s] conception was not some utterly different and unimaginable world. It was neither far away nor long ago … hidden behind a veil or screen … It was and had always been everywhere ….