Lit. Match: ‘The Fraud’ & ‘The Staircase’

Curated pairings of literature and pop culture

Zadie Smith’s 2023 novel, The Fraud, tells a layered set of stories about art and artists, writers and writing, cons and con artists. It’s a work of historical fiction, but it uses its historical setting to speak to contemporary interests in several ways that make it a very fitting match with the true-crime drama, The Staircase.

So, if you are interested in adding a layer to your reading and viewing life by looking at a novel and a show as a pairing, I’m going to recommend you give these two a try as a curated pair.

Here’s my pairing pitch:

In The Fraud, Zadie Smith explores the intersections of celebrity and writing success by using Charles Dickens as a character, a figure willing to exploit those around him. In Smith’s novel, Dickens is a literary celebrity on the wrong side of the issue of slavery and generally described by a utilitarian, purely performative adherence to morality.

As David Ulin puts it in a review of The Fraud, Smith’s depiction of Dickens carries the “implication […] that writers are thieves, and dissemblers.”

There is a question being posed about how much the temperament of a “real artist” is necessarily characterized by performance, duplicity, and a willingness to exploit — and how much of this contributes to the achievement of celebrity.

Celebrity also plays into another major element of the story — the one most discussed in reviews of The Fraud — which concerns a scandalous trial based on true events.

The highly publicized trial hinges on one man’s claim to be the lost heir of a family fortune in England. His claims are dubious but his story and his growing celebrity stir the public’s interest, striking a chord with working class people who have grown to resent the insulation and exceptionalism of the wealthy. They see the claimant’s trial as a moral disputation. In their eyes, he is merely claiming his due as a human being. He is saying he deserves as much as anyone else. It’s an assertion that goes beyond the facts of the case and attaches the trial to deeper ideas about social class and social grievance.

The different threads of Smith’s novel come together in questions of sympathy and trust. And the function of celebrity is closely attached to both. For these reasons, the pop culture pairing that comes to mind for The Fraud is HBO’s version of The Staircase, a fictionalized telling of the true-crime story of Michael Peterson, a novelist accused of killing his wife.

There are many notable connections between The Fraud and The Staircase that help make this pair potently complimentary. Peterson is a novelist, like several central figures in The Fraud. His profession makes him a story teller, a performer, and maybe a natural liar. There are big questions about how trustworthy the story of his innocence might be. And the case makes him a celebrity, bringing attention to the case and inviting a non-factual concern from the public who wants to use Peterson as a moral metaphor in ways that are similar to Smith’s claimant in The Fraud.

The Staircase was a documentary series on Netflix before it was a fictional series on HBO. That would work as a pairing too, but the fictional version seems like a perfect fit as a pairing with The Fraud. The freedom from a strictly factual retelling of the story allows the mini-series to best explore the complicated core of the trial and its effect on the Peterson family.

If you’re interested, try out this pairing. And let me know how it works for you.