Review
“[The Fraud] offers a vast, acute panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters. . . . In all of her books Smith has paid attention to a mixed-up London and particularly to Willesden, where she grew up. In this novel, she is quite actively digging into London’s history, trying to understand how a person like her, with European and Jamaican ancestry, came to exist here in the first place. What forces deposited Black people on these shores? With her multicultural eye she also gives us a London that is more racially mixed than that found in other novels about the period. . . . As always, it is a pleasure to be in Zadie Smith’s mind, which, as time goes on, is becoming contiguous with London itself. Dickens may be dead, but Smith, thankfully, is alive.” —Karan Mahajan, The New York Times Book Review
“The Fraud, [Smith’s] sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean . . . In all this multiplicity, different models of Victorian fiction are inherited and transformed . . . The Fraud is a curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction . . . It slows and expands lavishly in honour of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy. Happily its eight ‘volumes’ can be bound with one spine. Here is historical fiction with all the day-lit attentiveness that Eliza hopes for: ‘stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other and kind. Usually both.’ Generous and undogmatic as ever, Smith makes room for ‘both’.” —Alexandra Harris, The Guardian
“Smith has long been fascinated by, and is expertly attuned to, the authority and status conferred on those who can wield language entertainingly or persuasively. This is the novelist’s prowess—and the politician’s and the swindler’s. . . . Over and over, The Fraud insists on the duty of the novelist to deeply imagine the other—a project that may be doomed to fail but remains worth attempting. Smith was a convincing mouthpiece for this argument in The New York Review of Books not simply because she’s a persuasive critic but because she has made a career writing novels that do this well.” —Jordan Kisner, The Atlantic
“Smith’s characteristically expansive new novel, The Fraud, works by indirection . . . Some of what The Fraud says about our own time is troubling and meant to be so. But Smith is never solemn . . . Her curiosity seems endless, she’s willing to let the past surprise her, and though the book doesn’t offer a new form of historical fiction, I would bet that it does represent a new moment in the career of Zadie Smith.” —Michael Gorra, The New York Review of Books
“The best and most poignant sections of The Fraud examine the highly prescribed space for a sharp, smart woman in a culture that has no interest in sharp, smart women, particularly a dependent one of a certain age with little money. Eliza cannot be honest about her cousin’s novels; she cannot be open about her sexuality; she cannot pursue her own interest in writing . . . As ever, Smith continually works against expectations . . . [The Fraud] excels at sleight of hand. The syncopated arrangement of these short chapters jumps back and forth in time, placing Ainsworth’s youthful popularity in contrast to his later years of panicked self-doubt. But the focus remains on the mysterious Eliza Touchet — so externally polite, so internally acute — struggling till the end of her life to divine what to believe when the human condition is essentially fraudulent.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“[A] great success. Certainly it’s my favorite of this writer’s novels. Ms. Smith has always been superb at conjuring voices (in this she is more like Dickens than she might prefer), and the scenes come to life in whirlwinds of dialogue that hurl together working-class cant, Caribbean patois and Queen’s English. Though The Fraud is capacious, its chapters are short, vivid and contained…For perhaps the first time since her 2000 debut, White Teeth, Ms. Smith has allowed herself the freedom to be brilliant, without giving equal time to the dutiful rebuttals of guilt and misgiving.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“Along with Smith’s signature wry wit and the beautiful originality of her sentences, The Fraud’s strength lies in how it portrays Eliza’s awakening to the realities of race in 19th-century Britain…The Fraud is absorbing, resonant and relevant.” —The Boston Globe
“[A] brilliant new entry in Smith’s catalog . . . The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“This kaleidoscopic novel revolves around the real-life trial of a man who, in late-nineteenth-century London, claimed to be the heir to a fortune . . . The sprawling story is filled with jabs at the hypocrisy of the upper class, characters who doubt institutions, and corollaries of the pugilistic rhetoric of contemporary populism; with characteristic brilliance, Smith makes the many parts of the tale cohere.” —The New Yorker
“Zadie Smith is a gifted storyteller and prose stylist. And The Fraud makes a compelling case that historical fiction can lie to tell the truth.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“When [Zadie Smith] she burst onto the scene at 24 with White Teeth, her bestselling debut published in 2000, Ms Smith earned comparisons to Charles Dickens…perhaps it was only a matter of time before she would write a historical novel after all. [The Fraud] is based on a real court battle in 1873, in which a seemingly uneducated butcher from east London claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the presumed-drowned heir to a grand estate… The Fraud leaps from stuffy English parlours to Jamaican sugar plantations, where African slaves lost their names, their loves and often their lives while toiling for the British. The effect is potent, as Ms Smith—a child of a white father and Jamaican mother—considers a worse fraud than a butcher’s claim to wealth. Beneath the sweetened tea of polite society was a hellscape of inhumanity.” —The Economist
“2023 has been a remarkable year for literature for many reasons, including the long-awaited return of Zadie Smith… Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a captivating look into the fraudulent and the authentic.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Fans will find much they recognise in her tremendous new novel . . . After a while, you realise that The Fraud isn’t Smith’s first historical novel. It is her first prequel: a book that provides the pre-history of both the world and the neighbourhood that she first brought to life in White Teeth with a divorced war veteran trying, unsuccessfully, to gas himself opposite an Indian restaurant on New Year’s Eve in 1975. Just like White Teeth, The Fraud is a novel that illuminates what it is to live and to love in the 21st century.” —Stephen Bush, Financial Times
“Zadie Smith's The Fraud is a lot of things: a meticulously researched work of historical fiction, a smart narrative about the importance of truth and the shortcomings of perspective, and a tale that delves deeply into authenticity and justice . . . Smith's knack for developing full secondary characters and her talent for descriptions and witty dialogue make some parts of this novel as entertaining as the wildest fiction . . . The Fraud matters because it unearths stories that need to be told, and because it asks a lot of important questions in both the unearthing and the telling. This is a novel packed with great writing and shining passages that go from humorous to deeply philosophical.” —NPR
“This whip-smart historical novel follows the 1873 Tichborne trial from the perspective of Eliza Touchet, an uncompromising housemaid whose purpose on earth is to discover the truth behind headlines. Who stands in her way? Self-aggrandizing men, literary friends of her cousin by marriage, and good old-fashioned polite society. Documenting both intimate family scenes and true events, Smith tells a crackling story of hubris, justice, and storytelling itself.” —Oprah Daily
“My favorite of Smith’s work . . . The Fraud is a deeply researched historical novel, a first for Smith and one that she resisted mightily, but the characters are vividly rendered and distressingly familiar . . . Smith has once again proved that she’s a writer willing to challenge herself as she navigates complicated character dynamics and the heavy weight of history—all with a keen sense of humor.” —Shondaland
“It is in [Smith’s] openness to and her endless curiosity about other people, even the ones she disagrees with, that her power lies. The Fraud . . . feels free in a way Smith’s novels haven’t in a long time, as if she is once again wandering a path of her own choosing, shaped by her own unhindered desires. Think of it as an instruction manual for how to read our fellow human beings, and also how to read Zadie Smith: Always prepare for surprises, and never make up your mind.” —Laura Miller, Slate
“Elegant . . . The heart of The Fraud is flawed, charismatic Mrs. Touchet, who is so intelligent and yet not quite intelligent enough to see all the ways she fails herself.” —Constance Grady, Vox
“Zadie Smith’s funny, almost flawless new novel examines identity, the notion of truth and 19th century England and Jamaica in flux. . . . Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were ‘two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined,’ joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s ‘secret word’: slavery.” —The Observer
“Smartly rendered, true to its own time while also deeply reflective of ours, it’s a terrific novel, perhaps Smith’s finest . . . The Fraud is a novel of sublime empathy, in which the author’s voice and perspective bestow a contemporary edge. From the Claimant and his supporters to Ainsworth and Mrs. Touchet, Smith understands how much we need one another, and the consolations of narrative, true and false.” —4Columns
“Zadie Smith has done what she never wished to do: she wrote a historical novel. Thankfully for her, and for us, she managed to take this form and spin it into something entirely new, a feat only Smith could undertake . . . It’s an extremely smart and involved novel that asks all the right questions about morality and nuance. I would describe The Fraud as I would describe life: it’s complicated, deep, ridiculous, scary, and funny. It took a genius to write it, and cements Zadie Smith as the British novelist of our time.” —Julia Hass, Literary Hub
“Smith deftly weaves rich source material, including trial transcripts, into a lively though never straightforward narrative. . . . In a brilliant move, The Fraud is told largely from the close third-person viewpoint of Eliza Touchet, an uncommonly strong, sharp-tongued observer…What makes Smith’s latest novel so compelling is the way Eliza grapples not just with the suggestibility of most people. . . but also with her own biases and limitations.” —Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
“Employing nimble dialogue and sly humor, Smith moves The Fraud along swiftly and mysteriously, challenging you to keep up with competing plot lines. One of these concerns the Tichborne affair — the wild, real-life court case in which a gruff butcher claimed to be a long lost nobleman and heir to a sizable fortune. Smith’s retelling of this “trial of the century” alone is worth the price of admission for The Fraud, though I could have spent an entire novel in the company of prosaic novelist William Ainsworth and Eliza Touchet, his witty abolitionist housekeeper, muse, lover, and, of course, cousin.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction is both splendidly modern and authentically old. . . Smith, in the way of a Victorian stereoscope, ties together bountiful images, personalities and dramas into a single dazzling, three-dimensional picture. The Fraud is the genuine article.” —The Independent
“Pithy, richly detailed. . . Smith’s sixth novel explores themes of race, class, power and loss. . . in many ways, The Fraud has much in common with Smith’s contemporary novels in its deft portrayal of metropolitan society and the entangled lives within. . . as this novel shows, there is no better guide to people and their bottomlessness than Smith herself.” —The i
“An ambitious novel. . . . I often admired it very much.” —The Times (UK)
“[Smith’s] first foray into historical fiction will garner fresh admirers with its detailed 19th-century narrative, while also satisfying fans who have long enjoyed her on-target observations and richly drawn characters. Witty and incisive . . . the novel’s firm grounding in the past offers a rich reflection of the present—and the ways race and class impact our understanding of ourselves and our complicated history.” —BookPage
“What does it take to uncover a fraud or claim one’s fate? Inspired by a real trial in Victorian England, Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, brilliantly ‘written in spite of her hesitations,’ crackles with details and characters that bring to life issues of power, race, and the notion of authenticity.” —Boston Globe, “Here are 20 books we’re excited to read this fall”
“An English author with a tin ear and an involute sexual past pens a ‘Jamaican novel’ as a newsy trial unfurls, a once-enslaved man the key witness, in Zadie Smith’s Victorian historical novel par excellence.” —Vanity Fair, “The Best New Books, From Novels to Memoirs”
“Mesmerizing . . . Smith weaves Eliza’s shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle’s ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth’s books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first-and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Smith, in her most commanding novel to date, dramatizes with all-too relevant insights crucial questions of veracity and mendacity, privilege and tyranny, survival and self, trust and betrayal . . . Smith is always a must-read, and this spectacularly entertaining and resonant historical novel will have enormous appeal.” —Booklist (starred review)
“The cultural and literary life of Victorian England erupts vibrantly from each page of this extraordinary novel . . . Smith wrestles contemporary themes surrounding women’s independence, racism, and class disparity from centuries-old events . . . Readers of Geraldine Brooks or Hilary Mantel will be enthralled.” —Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time; as well as a novella, The Embassy of Cambodia; three collections of essays, Changing My Mind, Feel Free and Intimations; a collection of short stories, Grand Union; and the play, The Wife of Willesden, adapted from Chaucer. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People. Zadie Smith was born in north-west London, where she still lives.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
A Very Large Hole
A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually - but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who'd opened the door - easily amused, susceptible to beauty - found she couldn't despise him.
'You're from Tobin's?'
'Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn't it?'
'But two men were requested!'
'All up in London, missus. Tiling. Fearsome amount of tiling needs doing in London, madam . . .'
He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn't move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly:
'Number One, St James-es Villas, St James-es Road, Tunbridge Wells. The name's Touch-it, ain't it?'
From inside the house came a full-throated Ha! The woman didn't flinch. She struck the boy as both canny and hard, like most Scots.
'All pronunciations of my late husband's name are absurd. I choose to err on the side of France.'
Now a bearded, well-padded man emerged behind her in the hall. In a dressing gown and slippers, with grey through his whiskers and a newspaper in hand, he walked with purpose towards a bright conservatory. Two King Charles spaniels followed, barking madly. He spoke over his shoulder - 'Cousin, I see you are bored and dangerous this morning!' - and was gone.
The woman addressed her visitor with fresh energy: 'This is Mr Ainsworth's house. I am his housekeeper, Mrs Eliza Touchet. We have a very large hole on the second floor - a crater. The structural integrity of the second floor is in question. But it is a job for two men, at the very least, as I explained in my note.'
The boy blinked stupidly. Could it really be on account of so many books?
'Never you mind what it was on account of. Child, have you recently been up a chimney?'
The visitor took exception to 'child'. Tobin's was a respectable firm: he'd done skirting boards in Knightsbridge, if it came to that. 'We was told it was an emergency, and not to dawdle. Tradesmen's entrance there is, usually.'
Cheek, but Mrs Touchet was amused. She thought of happier days in grand old Kensal Rise. Then of smaller, charming Brighton. Then of this present situation in which no window quite fit its frame. She thought of decline and the fact that she was tied to it. She stopped smiling.
'When entering a respectable home,' she remarked, lifting her skirts from the step to avoid the dirt he had deposited there, 'it is wise to prepare for all eventualities.'
The boy pulled off his cap. It was a hot September day, hard to think through. Shame to have to move a finger on such a day! But cunts like this were sent to try you, and September meant work, only work.
'I'll come in or I won't come in?' he muttered, into his cap.
2
A Late Ainsworth
She walked swiftly across the black and white diamonds of the hall, taking the stairs two at a time without touching the banister.
'Name?'
'Joseph, ma'am.'
'It's narrow here - mind the pictures.'
Books lined the landing like a second wall. The pictures were of Venice, a place he'd always found hard to credit, but then you saw these dusty old prints in people's houses so you had to believe. He felt sorry for Italian boys. How do you go about tiling a doorstep with water coming right up to it? What kind of plumbing can be managed if there's no basement to take the pipes?
They arrived at the library disaster. The little dogs - stupid as they looked - skittered right to the edge but no further. Joseph tried standing as Tobin himself would, legs wide, arms folded, nodding sadly at the sight of this hole, as you might before a fallen woman or an open sewer.
'So many books. What's he need with them all?'
'Mr Ainsworth is a writer.'
'What - so he writ them all?'
'A surprising amount of them.'
The boy stepped forward to peer into the crater, as over the lip of a volcano. She joined him. These shelves had held histories three volumes deep: the kings, queens, clothes, foods, castles, plagues and wars of bygone days. But it was the Battle of Culloden that had pushed things over the edge. Anything referring to Bonnie Prince Charlie was now in the downstairs parlour, covered in plaster, or else caught in the embrace of the library's Persian rug, which sagged through the hole in the floor, creating a huge, suspended, pendulous shape like an upturned hot air balloon.
'Well, now you see, madam, and if you don't mind me saying' - he picked up a dusty book and turned it over in his hand with a prosecutorial look on his face - 'the sheer weight of literature you've got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.'
'You are exactly right.'
Was she laughing at him? Perhaps 'literature' was the wrong word. Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong. He dropped the book, discouraged, knelt down, and took out his yardstick to measure the hole.
Just as he was straightening up, a young child ran in, slid on what was left of the parquet and overturned an Indian fern. She was pursued by a nice-looking, bosomy sort in an apron, who managed to catch the child moments before she fell through the house. ‘Clara Rose! I told you - you ain’t allowed. Sorry about that, Eliza.’ This was said to the prickly Scot, who replied: ‘That’s quite all right, Sarah, but perhaps it’s time for Clara’s nap . . .’ The little Clara person, in response to being held so tight at the waist, cried: ‘No, Mama, NO!’ - yet seemed to be addressing the maid. The boy from Tobin’s gave up all hope of understanding this peculiar household. He watched the maid grasp the child, too hard, by the wrist, as mothers did round his way. Off they went. ‘A late Ainsworth,’ explained the housekeeper, righting the fern.
3
A New Spirit of the Age
Downstairs, the Morning Post lay discarded by an uneaten breakfast. William sat brooding, his chair facing the window. There was a brown paper package in his lap. He started at the sound of the door. Was she not meant to see him in his sadness?
'Eliza! Miladies! There you are. I thought you'd abandoned me . . .'
The dogs arrived panting at his feet. He didn't look down or stroke them.
'Well, I'm afraid it'll be a week at least, William.'
'Hmmm?'
'The ceiling. Tobin only sent one boy.'
'Ah.' As she reached for his breakfast things he put a hand out to stop her: 'Leave that. Sarah will take that.' Then stood up, and seemed to glide away in his slippers, silent as a shade.
Something was wrong. Her first instinct was to check the newspaper. She read the front page and scanned the rest. No friends suddenly dead or disturbingly successful. No unusual or uniquely depressing news. More working men were to be allowed to vote. Criminals were no longer to be transported. The Claimant had been found not to speak a word of French, although the real Roger Tichborne grew up speaking it. She put everything back on the tray. As she understood it, Sarah's opinion was that breakfast trays were now beneath her dignity. Yet no maid had been hired to replace her, and so it fell to Mrs Touchet.
Turning to leave, she tripped on something - the package. It was a book, unwrapped only so far as to reveal the title: A New Spirit of the Age, by R. H. Horne. It was a long time since she'd seen that book. Not quite long enough to forget it. She picked it up and looked furtively around the room - she hardly knew why. Opening it, she hoped she would be mistaken, or that possibly it was a new edition. But it was the very same volume of literary critiques, and with the same short, damning entry on her poor cousin, towards the back.
Twenty years ago, the publication of this book had merely darkly clouded one dinner party and mildly spoiled the morning after. Back then William was not so easily deflated. She brought the two sides of the torn brown paper together. No postmark. But it was addressed in a clear hand to the man whose life’s work was summarized within as ‘generally dull, except when it is revolting’.
The strange thing about good people, Eliza had noticed, was the manner in which they saw that same quality everywhere and in everyone, when in truth it is vanishingly rare.Highlighted by 952 Kindle readers
