Exit
NW is new territory. The sentences tend to be short on their own,
and imagistic en masse. Only six
words of the first paragraph are
spent describing Leah Hanwell,
the novel’s earliest protagonist.
“She keeps to the shade. Redheaded.” remains the bulk of what we
know of Hanwell’s look: pale, red,
Irish (later we learn she’s tall and
thin). A chapter toward NW’s end
is a line long. For Smith, whose
quick, hyper-articulate sensibility
can limit her to the title of comic
novelist, this departure into what
feels at times more like poetry
than prose seems like a journey
painstakingly mapped out.
But it’s great fun to follow. Many
of the characters bear the names of
Smith heroes past (Hanwell, Iqbal,
Irie), and in some ways the novel
feels like a greatest hits compilation playing out in an alternate
universe. Once the action gets going, we’re off in a dreamy, layered
land where dialogue functions
as signals. Each time the words
“bruv” and “blatantly” come out
of the mouth of Felix Cooper,
the cheery, reformed drug dealer
whose POV makes up an interlude
between sections on Hanwell and
her oldest friend Keisha Blake,
Smith is signaling, not riffing. Coo-
BOOKS
HUFFINGTON
09.09.12
per’s fondness for standard nicknames (“bruv,” “blud”), and by
extension, stylized intimacy, turns
out to be his downfall. “Blatantly,”
as well as “literally,” which punctuates a later section of the novel,
act as markers on a shifting timeline. “That was the year people
began saying ‘literally,’” Smith’s
omniscient narrator explains.
This magic sustains until the
novel’s end, when the wrap-it-up
This departure into what
feels at times more like poetry
than prose seems like a journey
painstakingly mapped out. But
it’s great fun to follow.”
feel of an awards ceremony speech
takes hold, and the varying plots’
loose ends are slicked together
as if by necessity. Without giving
away any surprises, the occurrence that finally links Hanwell,
Blake and Cooper in a way presumably unique to their shared
geography, feels contrived, inserted for reasons of “seriousness”
rather than narrative propulsion.
But then, the telling of the event
is done with such agility,
it’s hard to be bothered.