ZADIE Smith has never set much store by consistency. “Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don’t, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work,” she once told this newspaper. “It’s not consistent. I am not consistent.”
None of us is. And our contradictory selves have always prompted Smith’s liveliest writing, from her dazzlingly various debut White Teeth (2000) to her essay collection, Intimations (2020). In The Fraud, her first foray into historical fiction, the theme becomes something like a rallying cry. “A person is a bottomless thing!” the protagonist Eliza thinks while watching a Jamaican-born former slave address a crowd address a crowd. “She might rush to the stage to proclaim it. A person is a bottomless thing!”
