Zadie Smith, _The Fraud_

A FREQUENTLY OCCURRING short descriptor of this novel in the week of its publication was "Zadie Smith's Victorian Novel." One definitely ought to parse that phrase as "a Zadie Smith novel set in Victorian England" and not as "Zadie Smith writing in the mode of the Victorian novelists." 

The novel's technique is not at all that of the usual Victorian novelist, that of, for instance, William Harrison Ainsworth, who figures as one of Smith's major characters in The Fraud: wooly, overstuffed, sentimental, packed with the burrs of the period's prejudices. Nor is it much like that of the great Victorian novelists like Dickens and Thackeray, who make cameo appearances. 

It is, happily, a 21st century Zadie Smith novel, mobile in time and space, mercurial in its points of view, composed of swift but revealing glimpses, alert to the nuances of difference in class and gender identities, funny, written with energy, and in love with northwest London.

There is a point to the Victorian setting, though. Suppose we say that 19th century English novels tended to be vague on the role of colonialism and slave-holding in creating the wealth and power of the society those novels depicted, and not always wholly articulate about how that wealth and power was monopolized by the male portion of the upper and middle classes. One can think of exceptions, but Victorian fiction generally turns a blind eye to those topics. Not Smith, of course.

The principal point-of-view character in The Fraud is Eliza Touchet, cousin by marriage to the novelist Ainsworth and the person who takes over the management of the Ainsworth household when his first wife dies. Eliza has sexual relationships with both Ainsworth and Mrs. Ainsworth--so there's that. She is also a convinced abolitionist--so there's that. 

And in the novel's fundamental "now" (with frequent flashbacks) of about 1870, she becomes a spectator of the unfolding (and historical) case of the Tichborne Claimant, in which an unlikely man claims to be the long-lost heir to a title and fortune. (The second Mrs. Ainsworth is a vocal partisan of the Claimant.) What really fascinates Mrs. Touchet, though, is the role in the case of the formerly enslaved Andrew Bogle, who provides the Claimant with what slender evidence he has of being the real thing.

It's in the ups-and-downs of the case of the Claimant and the characters' involvement in it that the reader sense the novel's closest kinship to our own awkward moment. Not that racism and patriarchy are not a part of our moment--Lord knows they are--but the crossfire of competing sets of information, the passionate attachment to dubious causes, and the long-simmering resentments over feeling excluded from power are as pointedly present in The Fraud as they are in the Anglo-American world of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson (not to mention Modi, Orban, Le Pen, Erdogan...). 

The conversation between Eliza Touchet and Henry (son of Andrew) Bogle in the 40th chapter of Volume 8, pp. 440-45, I would say, presents in essence the big question of the 2020s.