At its heart, Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel NW is an exploration of boundaries. Smith’s writing pays particular attention to the power of location – whether that be in a physical sense through her highly accurate walks through north-west London or chapters made entirely of Google Maps directions, or the metaphorical place one inherits in terms of class boundaries, race, or social standing. Each of Smith’s characters are pinpointed in relation to these boundaries, with the traversing of their borders the key theme of the text. Focusing on the journeys of Leah and Natalie, the two female protagonists of the text, I argue that in Smith’s creation of a work so focused on place, NW calls for an intersectional view of movement through class, race, and geographic lines, demonstrating that the path of the immigrant is much more complex than a simple question of their background.
From its name to its title chapters, geography plays a crucial role in constructing NW. The name itself – a reference to the NW postcode area of north-west London, or as Slavin suggests, additionally a reference to the area being a “NoWhere” (98) – sets the boundaries of the text from the outset, pushing readers to understand the text as an exploration of how its four central characters interact with the geography of the British capital. Crucially, however, as Slavin argues, the characters of the text inherit the periphery of the city, rather than its imagined centre. Slavin suggests that this contributes to Smith’s construction of Willesden and Kilburn as “‘somehow outside Britain,’ ‘elsewhere,’ and not part of the national or city narrative,” (100) allowing for a narrative that pushes against what might be seen as a traditional or normative conception of the city, where “Smith wedges into a tradition of postcolonial writers remapping the city of London in their own image.” (101). Indeed, Smith’s own experience of this part of London undoubtedly contributed to the novel’s visceral locative abilities; Smith herself grew up in Willesden and attended local schools, later returning to live in nearby Queen’s Park during her adult life.
Though both Leah and Natalie spend most of the novel living within the boundaries of NW, the differences between the two women’s exploration of life outside the borough of Brent also contribute to a reading of their character. Leah, from the very start of the novel, is introduced as “in a hammock, in the garden of a basement flat. Fenced in, on all sides.” (Smith 3) Aside from a brief exploration of her life at university, Leah generally remains within the bounds of NW in the novel – a geographic manifestation of her static social life, love life, employment prospects, and friendships. On the occasions that Leah is depicted as travelling, such as with her mother in chapter 12 of the first “Visitation” section, Leah’s intended destination is unexplored. Instead, Smith focuses on the sites of entry and exit to the geographical boundary of the Willesden/Kilburn area, and the journey away from it. In doing so, Leah appears ignorant or uninterested in the actions of life outside of her spatial boundary – one that she is “as faithful in her allegiance to […] as other people are to their families, or their countries.” (Smith 6). Natalie, instead, spends much of her novel outside of the bounds that Leah largely restricts herself to, with attention paid to her experiences at her chambers in central London, her journeys abroad with her husband, and other endeavours far outside the bounds of the borough she was raised in. Much like Leah, Natalie’s conception of travel can be viewed in a metaphorical sense in terms of her own ‘journey’ in the novel; as opposed to Leah’s sense of stagnation and lack of adventure, Natalie glides over both physical and societal boundaries throughout the novel, demonstrating her own desires to expand beyond the places she was born into.
Just as important as an exploration of these locative boundaries is to the narrative of NW, Smith’s interest in exploring constructed social boundaries of a number of kinds is also present throughout the text. First and foremost are the pervasive boundaries of class, the traversals of which form one of the central themes of the text. Whereas their immigrant mothers approach class with a sense of ambivalence, where “neither woman was in any sense a member of the bourgeoise but neither did they consider themselves solidly of the working class either,” (Smith 206), and Leah’s immigrant husband Michel rallies repeatedly against the class boundaries of the British society, as first-generation immigrants Leah and Natalie are tacitly aware of their positions in the British class structure and their own actions in attempting to rise the ladder of class. Both received a university education, ostensibly in the hopes that doing so would allow them to progress above their working-class roots. For Leah, however – a “state-school wild card” (Smith 35) and underachiever both in secondary school and at university – going to university did little to assist her. Instead, the process left her “out of pocket, out of her depth” (Smith 35), and seemingly underemployed as the only university graduate at her workplace.
Natalie’s path, meanwhile, is altogether different, with her desire to pursue education and improve her social standing. For her, class appears pervasive throughout the novel – a consideration even in social situations, where when getting drinks with a friend “as working-class female pupils they were often anxious to get it right.” (Smith 274). While the “it” in the sentence on first glance refers to the drink orders for her round, it could also more abstractly be read as her desire to fit into the social milieu of the barristers and lawyers that make up her group of colleagues and friends. Yet her ascent to the middle classes is not left unchallenged by the other characters in the book. Throughout the book, Leah attacks her best friend for her class ascendancy, criticising her for her “cava socialist” tendencies (Smith 292) and consistently comparing her own situation to that of her friend’s. In some references, Smith brings together the concept of both locative and class boundaries when referring to Natalie’s house – a place that is, according to Leah, “just far enough to avoid” seeing the working-class estates where she grew up (Smith 70), in an example of physical and imagined boundaries fusing together.
Race similarly appears as an example of the testing of both physical and imagined boundaries throughout the work, with both Leah and Natalie living on the edge of these racial boundaries. Though Cuevas has suggested that Smith is writing ‘from a “post-ethnic” perspective’ (394, quoted in Shaw 18), I agree with Shaw’s assertion that the exploration of ethnicity remains a key part of NW and the two women’s experience of their London lives (Shaw 18). Leah, the daughter of a Protestant Irish mother (or, as she is presented by Smith in harsher terms, “a rare Prod on the wing, back when most were of the other persuasion.” (Smith 19), is acutely conscious of her race, being “the only white girl on the Fund Distribution Team,” (Smith 39) and married to an Algerian immigrant. For Natalie, race is quickly presented as a hurdle for her legal career, exemplified in her conversation with Theodora Lewis-Lane, one of the barristers on her chambers’ diversity programme, who explains to Natalie that the Black lawyer “is never [seen as] neutral” in court, but instead seen by the White-dominated justice system as an “interloper” that needs to be toned down (284). While not a post-ethnic novel, the novel’s exploration of race and ethnicity represents another layer of periphery and boundary that NW explores, upending the idea of White homogeneity in modern-day London.
In addition to this post-colonialist reading of NW that “portrays postcolonial London as a space where race and ethnicity are still important epistemic realities in need of continued interrogation” (80), Fernández Carbajal also argues for viewing NW through Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, in both texts’ demonstration of a “queer modernist dissidence” (76). When Leah spots Shar in the street, for example, she comments on her “neat waist you want to hold,” and “something beautiful in the sunshine, something between a boy and a girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that.” (Smith 44) Leah, Fernández Carbajal argues, is a more modern version of Clarissa Dalloway herself, in her seeming hints towards love for Natalie and her unfulfilling marriage; for her part, Natalie resembles Sally Seton, with her decision to choose a simple marriage than explore her own sexual desires. In doing so, Fernández Carbajal draws attention to another lens through which readers might understand the novel as one of demonstrating and breaking boundaries – whether in the physical or metaphorical sense. Indeed, he suggests that the novel’s depiction of sexuality is used “as a release from a sense of social inadequacy” (Fernández Carbajal 79) present in 21st century British society.
It is in the sum of these boundaries where we see Leah and Natalie performing their role as actors in the metropolitan space, with both of these first-generations immigrants seeking to refashion themselves throughout the text. Even from the first page of the novel, Leah is presented as ruminating on the fact that “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me,” a nod to her reclamation of the power to define her relationship to the boundaries that society places her in. Natalie, meanwhile, is presented “in drag” in her intersecting characteristics:
Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic. (Smith 333)
In this question of authenticity, both women are presented as unsure of their own place among these shifting borders (both real and imagined). Even at the end, despite the creations of these new identities, both women appear to have reverted to their original personas. As Pérez Zapata notes in her article, “‘In Drag: Performativity and Authenticity in Zadie Smith’s NW,” the end result of Natalie’s exploration of her own boundaries is that, by the end of the novel, Natalie “has no self and, consequently, no origin,” (93) with her character reverting back in name, form and speech pattern to the character of Keisha (her birth name, having changed it in the process of her secondary schooling.) This performative aspect is encapsulated by the novel’s final paragraph, where the two call the police to report what they know about a murder:
Leah found the number online. Natalie dialled it. It was Keisha who did the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset. “I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice. (402)
With this final image of a certain circularity to the novel for both Natalie and Leah, Smith appears to ask the reader to question the ability of the immigrant to refashion their own identity, suggesting that, in the multi-ethnic, socio-economically diverse London of the 21st century, the inheritance and persistence of one’s locations of birth are both inevitable and inescapable.
Works cited:
Fernández Carbajal, Albert. “On being queer and postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s NW through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Volume 51, Number 1, 2016, pp. 76–91
Shaw, Kristian. “A Passport to Cross the Room’: Cosmopolitan Empathy and Transnational Engagement in Zadie Smith’s NW (2012)”. C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings, Volume 5, Number 1, 2017, pp. 1–23.
Slavin, Molly. “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW.” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Volume 48, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 97-119.
Smith, Zadie. NW. New York: Penguin Books, 2012.
This paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations. Jack L. Allen
