50books_poc | 3. The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

3. The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

I'm at a loss about how to review a book like this, truly. I think I might try some variant on what I've seen some folk on the internet call The Snowflake Method, beginning with a simple observation and just pulling back and out again and again until I'm exhausted. (Back, after having finished my review... This got long. I don't ordinarily like to put things I've written under lj-cuts, because that seems to go against my urge to be heard and listened to, but if people ask I may agree to put this under a cut)

The simple observation: This is an extraordinarily beautiful, complicated, and difficult to understand book that is disguised as something middlebrow.

And the more I came to believe this observation, the more the reviews of this book began to make sense to me. Because the reviews are stunningly scathing, and the quick google search I did turned up, in addition to the reviews, a conversation about Smith's apparent growing frustration that critics did not seem to appreciate the book. And because my first reaction, over the first hundred pages or so, was "This is interesting, and I'm enjoying some of it, but why is Zadie Smith trying to write Philip Roth? There's something false here."

The first turning point was tiny. Alex-Li Tandem, the half-Jewish and half-Chinese protagonist, is talking to his best friend Adam, a pot-smoking kabbalist running a video store. And Adam mentions 'omphalos', the Greek word for navel whose symbolic meanings (origin, self-contemplation, motherhood, among others) are at the core of James Joyce's Ulysses. It's the first of several keywords that pointed me toward Ulysses as a partial key to unlocking the novel. Others that turn up later are Alex's book draft Jewishness and Goyishness- a funhouse mirror version of Stephen's meditative quip "Jewgreek is Greekjew", and ultimately an alphabetic tour of the liquor cabinet that begins with a visit to Stephen's beloved absinthe.

What is Ulysses about and what does it have to do with this novel? That's why this review is going to be so damned long. The easiest way to explain Joyce's novel is to say that Ulysses is a novel about an everyman named Leopold Bloom experiencing everything. This is not a particularly effective way to describe the novel, but it's a useful beginning because it points to the problem of using it as the key to another novel. Using Ulysses as your guide to reading The Autograph Man is like using a kaleidoscope to perform an astronomy experiment.

But that's not enough. I've spent literally hundreds of hours of my life wrestling with Ulysses, more than I've spent with any other book except the Bible, but I know enough to detect other Modernist ur-texts buried beneath The Autograph Man. Eliot's The Wasteland has a role, (In one of the sly chapter headings, never explicated, Smith writes "Eliot was goyish".) Virginia Woolf comes up again and again. Kafka's fiendish mind blurs some of the later chapters. All of this is in some sense straightforward, with an acknowledgment of debt followed by subtle inclusions of borrowed material. But the more lenses Smith provides you to try to read her novel, the clearer it becomes that this is not purely a linear narrative.

And that's important because nobody expected a linear narrative from Smith. Her debut novel, White Teeth is impressively multi. Multifaceted, multigenerational, multicultural, multithreaded. And a lot of the critics' frustration with The Autograph Man, I think, is that on its face it's a lot less ambitious of a novel. But you burrow in a little bit and what you find is a novel that's a lot more important. White Teeth is about politics and identity, the face that you display for the world. The Autograph Man is about death and love and hope, the things we search for inside ourselves. Like Ulysses, it's not immune to exploration of the meaning of ethnicity and identity and culture, but that's just at the surface of a novel that, as it dives into dreams and faith, becomes much more.

Alex-Li Tandem is a mess in this novel, arrested in development in much the same way Stephen Dedalus is. His father's death looms impossibly large over the story, like Stephen's mother's death does. He feels responsible, as Stephen does. He feels like he missed his chance to get close to his father. But Alex has a weapon Stephen didn't. Alex-Li Tandem is Jewish, and he can say Kaddish for his father.

This doesn't make sense. Li-Jin Tandem was not Jewish and did not approve of Alex being Bar Mitzvahed, and anyway, Alex is barely religious at all and has been drifting away from Judaism the more intense his study of the difference between Jewishness and goyishness becomes. (Again, like Stephen, though also like Bloom, but I should acknowledge here that Smith inverts part of this dynamic because in Ulysses Stephen's drift away from 'Jewishness' toward 'Greekness' is at least partially about his homosexual feelings for Buck Mulligan, while in The Autograph Man homosexuality is identified via Joseph's extreme closetedness with 'Jewishness') But... where was I before that parenthetical? I have so much to say about this novel it's downright distracting. Oh, right. Despite the fact that Kaddish seems like it ought to be the wrong response, it is the force of nature that impels the story forward. It is the ability to share a community. As the Rabbi explains toward the end, Kaddish is about you speaking and everyone responding to your needs. Ulysses is at its core the story of three outsiders navigating their aloneness. The Autograph Man is about building connections so you aren't so alone.

If I may, Ulysses is about the experience of living the events of June 16, 1904. The Autograph Man is about the joyously freeing experience of reading about those events, sharing in the community of us readers who have found a home in Joyceiana. (Joyceiana should not be understood too literally. One need not read Ulysses to be part of my 'us', the post-modern reader, the person whose intellectual life comes not from the text but from the conversation about the text. If you write fanfic, you're part of my us. If you remix videos or music. If quoting movies is an important part of how you express yourself. If you can't read a book without talking your friends' ears off about it.)

And ha, Alex and his cronies in the field of autograph collection spend the whole book telling each other that it's a profession, not a vocation, but the book gives lie to their mantra. We read and we write and we tell stories in a million different ways about other peoples' stories because we are compelled to, because it's the only way we can make sense of the world around us and we need desperately to make sense of it.

Okay, I think I've said enough in prologue to start actually talking about the book. Alex-Li Tandem is the son of a Chinese-British doctor named Li-Jin Tan who changed his name to Tandem when he immigrated to Britain, and a British Jew from Poland named Sarah. Hybridization, like in White Teeth is the essential method that forms Smith's characters. These also include: Esther and Adam Jacobs, Black Jews from Harlem who came to London because of the English health care system when they couldn't afford a pacemaker for Esther, Honey, an African-American call girl infamously caught with a famous actor, Kitty Alexander, an Italian-Russian who became a famous actress in America by changing her name and pretending to be Chinese, Mark Rubinfine, who becomes a Rabbi despite his obvious ineptitude for the job, and numerous others.

Alex lost his father to a concealed brain tumor when he was a young teenager, in a traumatic event told very funnily and poignantly in the prologue. This event binds together a group of boys who witnessed it. Alex, Adam, Mark, and Joseph become a clan bound together by the death of Alex's father and the ensuing quest for spiritual meaning they all embark on separately and together.

A lot of the reviews I've seen have expressed doubt that a person as reckless and thoughtless as Alex could get a community of people to keep helping him after all he's done to them. This ignores not only the bond I mentioned in the last paragraph, but also the reality that we often tolerate a lot in our friends and family we wouldn't from others. And it's obvious what Alex offers his friends, anyway: Love, intelligence, and potential. And potential is not something meaningless, it's a very real thing which many people gravitate toward even when it means immediate pain, even when they know that before we reap the reward they're going to have to deal with a broken person.

But reading the reviews of this book were maddening. James Wood spends several paragraphs complaining about Jewishness and Goyishness, bemoaning this is an obscene homage to Lenny Bruce. "Alas, Smith’s characters are all much involved with the divisions between what is Jewish and what is goyish. They sit around saying things like: ‘There was a black Jew’ (of Sammy Davis Jr). It is an obsession which seems essentially inauthentic, and which marks the novel precisely as one not written by a Jew... And should a serious novel – if this is what The Autograph Man is – proceed from, and then only lazily confirm, the shallow binarisms of Lenny Bruce? Despite its Judaic theological literacy, the novel’s Jewishness is so dominated by Bruce’s taxonomic vulgarity that it often seems no more than crude externality."

He completely ignores the Joyce connection, which traces backward to St. Paul and forward to Jacques Derrida, this distinction that for Wood is just a stupid, ironic game but for a lot of people encapsulates a world where opposites are constantly coming into collision, where the beautiful and the vulgar are not at odds so much as they are two windows into the same vision. It seems to me that Wood is the one too focused on irony, while Smith knows that irony is Jewish and sincerity is goyish and that makes them the same thing. Crude externality? Alex's obsession with naming things as Jewish or Goyish is beautifully kabbalistic, in the true sense of Kabbalah instead of the mummery Rabbi Berg sells to Madonna. Alex and Adam know, like Bruce and like centuries of Jews before them, that one of God's first gifts to mankind was the ability to name things (cf. Genesis 2:20).

And that's why I reached a grudging reconciliation with Smith's choice, in the first half of the book, to put the Tetragrammaton, in both English and Hebrew forms, in her chapter headings. This initially put me ill at ease, because I take the Third Commandment pretty seriously. I take God's name very seriously and I handle it with care because names can hold tremendous power, and I don't like seeing the name of God thrown around secularly and catholically. But I did reach, as I said, grudging reconciliation, because every time I saw it the same butterflies hit my stomach, but I saw the more I read that Smith understands the butterflies and was using the Tetragrammaton precisely because it's the most powerful word she knows. Because it represents an interface between the divine and the human.

Naming things matters. Language matters, and Wood's distaste for Smith's pop-culture intensive 'hysterical realist' style (That label is from his review of White Teeth, but in this review he writes "The Autograph Man may indeed be the nearest that a contemporary British writer has come to sounding like a contemporary American; the result is disturbingly mutant.") reflects a disconnect between Wood's aestheticism and the kind of language that is genuinely required to tell stories about the world we live in. In The Autograph Man, Smith takes obvious inspiration from all the people Wood identifies, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo and Dave Eggers, but her story is old-fashioned because it's also built on Kabbalah and Zen, ancient traditions for understanding language and the world around us whose relevance has not waned at all as the attention span of our information-driven culture has shortened.

I should say something about Zen, because a powerful transition happens near the midway point of the book when Smith moves from a London suburb to New York and begins theming her story with Zen motifs instead of kabbalistic ones. These are I assume meant to represent the two traditions Alex inherited from his parents, and almost certainly also to broaden the Jewgreek tradition that some have criticized in a post-colonialist sense as failing to accommodate the contrasts of the non-Western world.

It's beautiful, flowing language. I can't say as much about the significance of it as I can about the Kabbalah, and a growing part of me wonders if the reason so many people seem to have bounced off this book is because there is no handholding on the pop-cultural references. There are two approaches to the growing hypertextuality of the novel form. One approach is to fill a novel with irrelevant facts so that they're close at hand when they need to be consulted, in effect making the novel itself hypertextual. The other is to rely on the fact that readers are becoming hypertextual themselves and assume that when they don't get something, they'll go to Wikipedia.

Rather than infodump to guide readers through the nuances of some obscure fact required to understand the plot, Smith just demands her reader get her obscure references. This is more Joyce than Foster Wallace, though Smith's story at least can be read, unsatisfactorily, without getting the references. I know a good deal about Jewish mysticism and was able to deeply appreciate just how much effort she put into making that work realistically. I know just enough about Zen doctrine to recognize how much of that part of the story was slipping past me.

But I could keep talking about this book for a long time without reaching exhaustion, and I've already written a longer review than for any other book I've reviewed for this community, so I shall say no more than that I'm grateful that there's still On Beauty waiting for me to read.