Zadie Smith’s NW — Here, there is no future

Thoughts on NW by Zadie Smith

While it is difficult not to read NW (2012) with Zadie Smith’s personal biography in mind, the novel is not centrally concerned with who she is as a person. At least not directly. Because NW is concerned primarily with a sense of the future. More accurately, Smith’s novel is concerned with the absence of a sense of the future.

More experimental than Smith’s other novels, NW is built around two main characters — Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake, former schoolmates and best friends from the same section of London. Leah is White and Natalie is Black. Both women are struggling through the end stages of young adulthood.

Leah is secretly rebelling against the prospect of motherhood, covertly sabotaging the “shared plans” for starting a family that fixate her husband, a Black émigré from Africa. Natalie is keeping her own secrets, trying to maintain a recognizable façade of sophistication and success while teetering on the brink of a self-doubt and breakdown. She has changed her name from “Keisha” to “Natalie,” married a wealthy light-skinned black man, and is now attempting to strike a balance between motherhood and a career as an attorney.

There is a shared past for Leah and Natalie. They have personal history together. And they share a geographic history that goes a long way toward defining those personal histories. They are “of a place” and for each of them that place is the same — North West London.

In NW, Zadie Smith is using the delimitations of geographically-rooted identity as a main feature in a larger question about how a person’s failure to see beyond the limits of the present moment can become an existential wound, one that disallows growth and forces her characters to dwell within the bounds of a past that has become a sort of ill fitting clothing for the present.

At the end of the novel, Natalie wanders off from her upscale home and finds herself back in the old neighborhood, engaged in a conversation with Nathan Bogle, a classmate from high school who never made it out. He lives on the streets. Natalie gets high with him and gets both lost and found in the process. She is herself there, on that particular stretch of London pavement, but she is still not entirely sure what it means to be Natalie Blake.

Earlier in the text, Natalie and Leah seek out a church in the neighborhood. It is hard to find: “an ancient crenellation and spire, just visible through the branches of a towering ash. Another twenty yards and the full improbability of the scene is revealed. A little country church, a medieval country church, stranded on this half acre, in the middle of a roundabout. Out of time, out of place” (77). Neither woman is religious. That is not why they’ve gone out of their way to find the church. Instead, they are engaged in a symbolic action from which they seem to never fully break — the act of seeking something new within the landscape of the familiar.

Bounded by the sharply specific local identity-vocabulary of northwest London, both Leah and Natalie strive to break free. They strive to be themselves. Yet, they seem to lack the materials necessary to construct those selves. They cannot be new because their sole and constant reference is this very specific past.

“Is it all too much? Did you hope for something else? Were you misinformed? Was there more to it than that? Or less? If we give it a different name will the weightless sensation disappear? Are your knees going? Who are you? Would you like a glass of water? Is the sky falling? Could things have been different arranged, in a different order, in a different place?” (83)

A third character is introduced and followed briefly in the middle of the novel. Felix. From Caldwell too, he is the only character who has managed to craft some sense of real direction though he struggles as well to cut ties with his ex-girlfriend, unable to rise above the messy dramas he has come to loathe.

Felix imagines a future though. He has a new girlfriend, unlike anyone he has dated before. He has a vision for how things will be. But an incident on the neighborhood streets come between Felix and the future he is reaching out for. The boundaries of NW are absolute.

And it’s the hard line that Zadie Smith draws that forms the essential thematic question and interest of the novel. Her characters are removed from their own futures –emotionally, psychologically, physically — utterly removed from the creative act of self-definition.

While Leah is able to say, “I just don’t understand why I have this life” (399), we know that there are two valences at work in this line.

She knows fully why she is who she is because she knows where she is. But she does not understand how to change either of those things.