After 17 years abroad, Zadie Smith is back. She has returned to Kilburn in north-west London, where she grew up and which she has made her fictional territory since White Teeth turned her into a star in 2000. Her fourth novel was called, simply, NW. Even those novels that aren’t set here – On Beauty, Swing Time – touch down for a visit. Many of her characters escape only to come back eventually, just as she did, leaving New York during the pandemic with her husband, the Northern Irish poet Nick Laird, and their two children. “If you stay away too long, you just miss too much,” she says.
We meet in the William IV pub on the Harrow Road. Smith arrives on her bike in a black T-shirt and jeans, weighed down by a London Review of Books tote straining with books and her laptop. She is post-school run. (Her brother Ben – the comedian and rapper Doc Brown – and his family live close by, and his wife teaches at the school Zadie and her brothers went to as a children. “So it’s all very familiar,” she says now.) The pub has been chosen for its relevance to Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, which is once again set around Kilburn. But instead of the exhaust fumes, kebab joints and market stalls of her earlier novels, The Fraud looks back to a time when this area was just fields and manor houses. With its social injustice, inheritances, trials and reversals of fortune, the novel combines the world of Dickens (who has his own cameo appearances) with the verve of Hilary Mantel’s historical fiction. It is also extraordinarily timely. As Smith herself says: “It’s a corker.”
In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Smith wrote that she left London because she was weary of its “claustrophobic” literary scene. In particular, she was fed up with being cast as the “multicultural (ageing) wunderkind”, a label she hasn’t been able to shake off since White Teeth. Published in the first days of the new millennium, that novel made her the voice of a generation at 24 – the book world’s contribution to Cool Britannia. Now 47, the wunderkind has become the grande dame of British fiction. Another reason she left, she wrote in the same article, was because she didn’t want to write a historical novel and “any writer who lives in England … will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel”. So what happened?
“That piece was a bit of an exaggeration,” she confesses. “Sometimes I write pieces to avoid doing interviews.” Smith hates giving interviews. Back in 2013 she said on Desert Island Discs that her father was most proud when she appeared in the Guardian, because he considered it a “posh” paper: “He loved it,” she said. “I always dreaded it.”
“You should interview novelists while they are writing their novels,” she says now. “Because you are so high. And this novel in particular was just a joy. Every day I sat down at my desk I was happy and laughing to myself and satisfied.” But since she finished, she has been bereft. “The moment it’s done, something that’s been involving every fibre of your being and your mind and your soul is suddenly gone. I miss the people. I miss the whole thing.”
She wrote The Fraud in instalments, emailing chapters to two close friends each week, just as Dickens or Thackeray sent individual chapters to be printed in journals. While she had the luxury of editing, the finished novel is pretty much what landed in their inboxes. “It felt like I was connecting with this tradition that I’ve dedicated my whole life to. It was wonderful.”
The novel is based on the life of the prolific, but now largely forgotten, 19th-century novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who used to drink here with Dickens, and is buried (along with Thackeray) in Kensal Green Cemetery just opposite. Smith discovered his grave, and that of his housekeeper and possibly his lover Eliza Touchet, during her lockdown walks. (Her fictionalisation of their relationship is more S&M than Sense & Sensibility.) She passed his former home, now in a council block called Ainsworth House on Kilburn Lane, on her bike on the way here.
But The Fraud of the title refers to the Tichborne Claimant, an East Ender living in Australia called Arthur Orton, who claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, long-lost heir to a fortune. Orton is buried in a mass grave in Paddington Old Cemetery, near Smith’s house. It all came together on her doorstep. “I was very lucky,” she says.
The Tichborne trial of 1873 – one of the longest in British history – became a cause célèbre, as the Victorian public got behind not just Orton but his star witness, Andrew Bogle, a Black slave from Jamaica. A dangerous populist hero in the dock for weeks on end, whipping up a frenzy of support, conspiracy theories and fake news – sound familiar? If Smith didn’t have Donald Trump in mind when she first came across the story nearly 12 years ago, he loomed large when she finally started writing in 2020. “Trump presented himself in a paradoxical form as a working man’s champion, but also a billionaire,” she says. “Orton had huge rallies all over the country, saying the same things over and over again. People would put up the banners, shout the slogans. It was very reminiscent.”
The word “slavery” is barely mentioned, but it is the backdrop to everything in the novel, as Eliza, an abolitionist, follows the uprisings in Jamaica from Kensal Rise. “It is the unseen thing – that everybody is either looking at, fighting against or trying to ignore,” Smith explains. She wanted the book to show how people are able “to live on top of a monstrosity”. Again there are urgent contemporary parallels. “We live on top of a monstrosity now,” she exclaims; the environmental crisis is “the perfect analogy” to 19th-century attitudes towards slavery. “When we say ‘How could they ever?’, how can we ever?” she asks. “Are you going to get on a plane this summer? We do it all the time. How can we ever?”
Despite her role as a public intellectual, she refuses to be “in the ether of our soundbite culture”, she says. “I get in trouble when I talk about the state of the nation.” Like her friend Martin Amis, to whom she is in many ways a literary heir, she has always had an uneasy relationship with her celebrity. “The English habit” of attacking their brightest stars, then “on the verge of death, turning them into a national treasure”, Smith says of Amis’s mauling by the British press before he too left for New York. “It’s obscene!”
Smith was subjected to the media glare when she was barely out of university. “Most of the terrible stuff that went on when I was young was not really to do with me, it was an insane projection,” she says now. “You are dealing with what people themselves want.” Nobody could believe that a young woman wouldn’t want to be endlessly profiled, with her photo in the papers on the flimsiest excuse. “But I really didn’t want it. I don’t want to be a photograph in the newspaper because it fills some space.”
Neither did she want to present a TV show, write a column or any of the other things that were relentlessly pushed her way in her 20s. “As I made very clear, I want to write novels. Could you let me write them, please?”
Which is exactly what she did. White Teeth was followed by the often overlooked The Autograph Man, about the corrosive effects of fame. Its protagonist, the British-Jewish-Chinese Alex-Li Tandem, is “a weird, nerdy, obsessive, melancholy type of guy … he’s probably more like me than any character I ever created”, Smith admitted in a recent essay. Her next novel, On Beauty, a classy reworking of EM Forster’s Howards End transferred to a New England college town, won the Women’s prize in 2006. She was just 30.
There was a seven year gap until NW, a formally experimental but deeply personal novel about friendship and success, in 2012. Then came Swing Time in 2016, which also took in celebrity and shaming and was set partly in west Africa.
While all of Smith’s novels deal with race and class and gender – from Black girls growing up on a council estate in Swing Time to a forward-thinking 19th-century housekeeper in The Fraud – she doesn’t feel any sense of responsibility. “I take pleasure in it. That’s something I think I take from Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison. It is not some tedious moral weight. It is a delight,” she says. “I’m not here to represent anybody,” she adds. “I barely represent myself. My job is to think about things and to express them in language.” She pauses. “I want people to read me because I can write. That matters to me more than anything else.”
There has never been any doubt that Smith can write. Like Amis, she is as celebrated for her nonfiction as for her novels. New Yorker editor David Remnick describes her essays as nothing less than “a blessing … to the language itself”. Willesden library, the weather, Barack Obama, Brexit, Joni Mitchell and Justin Bieber are all tackled with the same mix of self-doubt and intellectual rigour. She once interviewed her hero Jay-Z – “I didn’t dare ask about Beyoncé.”
In the earliest days of the pandemic, “the global humbling” as she calls it, she wrote a collection of essays, a sort of farewell to her adopted city. Intimations was written and published in three months, with Smith and editors at Penguin all working from their bedrooms. All the proceeds went to charity. “I couldn’t bear the idea of literally doing nothing,” she says. “And all I could do was write.”
She taught fiction (20 novels each semester – her favourite was always Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye) at New York University and speaks often and fondly of her students. “It was a good time,” she says. “When you’re away from it you can appreciate what it gave you. It was really stimulating.” And she loved the anonymity of being in a city where you can’t walk down the sidewalk without bumping into a writer. “Then there’s Robert De Niro and Beyoncé. To be a writer in New York is to be very far down the food chain and that’s just so pleasant.”
Smith’s New York parties were legendary, with everyone from Amis to Lena Dunham showing up. “Writers work all day alone,” Smith says. “When it comes to seven o’clock I want to have a martini. I spent my entire youth in a room writing novels, so in the evening I like to drink and talk to people. It’s my favourite thing.”
But on the whole, writers’ lives just aren’t that interesting, she insists. Take JG Ballard, who lived very quietly with his three children in Shepperton in Surrey, but whose novels are “more radical, more imaginative, more wild, more challenging than anything in the English canon”. When it comes to publicity, she’s simply not cut out for it, she says. It just makes her anxious. “I’m not the only successful novelist in the world. Some seem to enjoy publicity very much. Some of them can’t get enough of it.” Aware that this might sound churlish, she adds: “Honestly, my job is seven years of sitting in my room and six months of being out on the road. As my father would say, ‘It’s not going down a coalmine, is it Zadie?’ And it isn’t.”
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Smith’s earliest years were spent on the Willesden estates of her novels with her two younger brothers, Ben and Luke. She was Sadie – changing her name to Zadie when she was 14. Nobody looked the same in her family, she says. “My mother is a very dark-skinned Jamaican woman, my father was an old white man.” There was a 30-year age gap between them. Her parents separated when the children were young, and her father moved into a flat round the corner, which worked well for everyone. He died in 2006.
“I was born at the coalface of being mistaken,” she says of her childhood. “People think I’m Moroccan or an Arab, or that my brother isn’t my brother, my mother’s not my mother, my father is not my father. You just stop believing in other people’s opinions. I know exactly who I am, where I come from. Other people’s view is not important.”
As she writes in her essays, she was lucky: able to take advantage of a state education system, a functioning NHS and free libraries. Her mum got hold of an old piano and made sure she had lessons. She played the violin in Brent Youth Orchestra. She got into Cambridge, where she met Laird: “We’re both from backgrounds where writing was not considered a job,” Smith says. She is acutely aware that things would be very different for young people today. “I knew I could go to college and maybe write some articles to try and get a foot in. There was a path, you might get a little deposit for a house without bankrupting yourself. This is not their situation. We can not imagine the feeling of precariousness that they are under.”
The climate emergency is where “my brain breaks down”, Smith says. “I’m just another citizen in despair. This is existential. We never had to deal with the idea that the future wouldn’t exist. Imagine that and being 18. It’s beyond imagining and they are having to live with it every day. Compassion is what is required – and action, of course.” Both Smith and Laird have turned out in support of Extinction Rebellion; American Poem in Laird’s new collection Up Late was written for a protest.
“I guess everybody with an iPhone knows how they are made, under what conditions, what’s inside them?” she continues. “I don’t see people throwing them in burning bins in the street.”
She pulls out her old Nokia. You can manage your life with just a dumbphone and a laptop, she says. “It’s not that hard.” Although she does concede that not having “a proper job” makes it easier.
What about when you get lost? “Oh my God, everyone asks that! Like getting lost is the worst thing that can ever happen to a human being,” she exclaims. “So let me get this right: in exchange for the maps you will give away your democracy, the mental health of your children, your own mental health – for a map? I will get you a map! We are free! If you want to be free, you can free yourself.”
Generation X is “incredibly self-involved”, she admits, citing the current publishing trend for books about the menopause. “We had jobs. No one’s ever had a job before. Then we had babies and it was as if no one had ever had a baby. And now we are having the menopause and you are going to hear about it,” she says, laughing. “There’s something very wrong with a generation that can’t stop thinking that we’re the first people in the world to ever experience anything.”
But there are some upsides to being a “90s kid”: this year marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. “I’ve seen the birth of an art form. I lived through it. How many people get to say that?”
She does feel a little wiser these days: “It takes your whole life just to get the basics.” The same is true of being a writer. “It’s a big deal to write as you would want to write. When you’re young, it’s a lot of ambition and energy, but not a lot of control.” Having ideas is never a problem – she already has a book of essays in mind – it’s having the time and the peace, and the will. “It takes a lot of will to write a novel,” she says. “When you’re 47, there are not so many books in front of you. And they take a while.”
Smith only writes in school hours. “There are plenty of days when you lose the whole day to the internet and that’s just what happens. It’s depressing,” she says. Laird writes in a shed in the garden; but in their New York apartment Smith would write in the bedroom and Laird in the next room, and when they were younger they would write at opposite ends of the sofa. “We have always spent an enormous amount of time together. We are used to it.” Since having children they work in relay. “We hold the fort when the fort needs to be held.” But she concedes that he took the brunt during lockdown. “I was really down and not functioning well. The Fraud would not have been written without him.”
A stint of therapy – “It’s hard not to in New York,” she jokes. “I did it for the people around me” – helped her recognise the peaks and troughs of getting a book out. But she still feels “this kind of manic enthusiasm when writing and then this slight lostness,” she says. “Life is hard for everyone, including me with all my luck.”
At the moment, all she wants to do is read; to catch up on the books that she missed while she’s been writing The Fraud. Tom Crewe’s The New Life, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck and actor Paterson Joseph’s historical novel on the life of Ignatius Sancho all get a big Smith endorsement. “I have an issue. I can’t stop,” she confesses of her reading habit. “That’s my life.”
She recently had an urge to reread Virginia Woolf, another writer who made the streets of London her own; she pulls a hardback of Woolf’s recently published diaries from her LRB bag. “Woolf never could have imagined being read by me in 2023, but that conjunction is so interesting,” Smith says, before heading out on to the Harrow Road to pick up her son for his piano lesson. “And she’s another one who likes a good party in the evening. She liked to go out after a long day’s writing. I feel very seen and cheered by that.”
• This article was amended on 27 August 2023 to correct the name of Kensal Green Cemetery.
• The Fraud is published on 7 September by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
