Slimmer and Slighter

...Smith seems to feel she needs plot to form her writing into novels, but she has yet to achieve a happy balance between charm and utility...

...A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse...

...He had aged, terribly...

...Get another one...

...He saw no purpose in leaving his bed for a day that was against him from the getgo...

...He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning...

...His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum...

...Smith's new novel, The Autograph Man, is slimmer and slighter...

...until Alex is safely back on the verbally fecund soil of North London...

...The father's concern for his son is countered by the attitude of another dad he meets at the match, who seems intent upon belittling his already puny offspring...

...By the time we see him again, in his late 20s, he has a become a professional "autograph man,' buying, selling and assessing the signatures of famous people...

...And so he wants him to be ready, normal...

...As a result, The Autograph Man feels like a first novel...

...We first meet Alex as an 11 -yearold, off to see a wrestling match with two friends and his father, who is suffering from a brain tumor...

...Smith pulls off the neat trick of larding the story with formal jokes...

...not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection...

...Im want everybody to keep tings separate...

...The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did...

...At the time, I said to his mother: I could tear him apart like a fish...

...What did the zero say to the eight...

...Smith manages a little nudging and winking to keep the reader moving from line to line, but it is difficult to read this scene without thinking of Kingsley Amis' superior wit and economy in describing Lucky Jim on a similar morning: "Dixon was alive again...

...During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by the secret police...

...It is as if the author handed over her word processor to someone else entirely (perhaps her editor...

...Compare and contrast with yesterday morning's light, pettily fascist, cruel as the strip lighting in a hospital hallway...

...When she takes Alex to New York and begins to send him on adventures, the writing falls flat almost as soon as the plane lands...

...He read it somewhere...

...Or the morning before yesterday morning, when he had kept his eyes closed for the duration, afraid of whatever was causing the ominous red throb beneath the eyelids...

...He felt no magic...

...But Smith's strengths are precise social observation and dialogue...

...Ha ha...

...The best scenes in The Autograph Man are those where her characters do nothing but chat with each other, generally with a joint in hand...

...She also has the right touch portraying joke-ish things: a dinner party for dwarfs, a dwarf rabbi, rabbis puzzling over how to fit enormous pieces of furniture into subcompact cars (with one novel, I suspect she has doubled the number of dwarfs and Jewish characters appearing in British literature...

...Granny is herself the offspring of a white colonial and his pretty Jamaican maid...

...Just the thick useless marijuana fug, staring at the letters, sensing nothing much, except vague anthropomorphisms: Didn't that one look like a man waving his fist...

...His life is ruled by such symbols, which he fails to transcend...

...White Teeth was a broadly funny yet closely observed portrait of two families, one Bengali and the other Anglo-Jamaican, who made their homes in mixed-up North London and lived to see their British-born kids react to the burdens of their ancestry with fundamentalist violence, pragmatism and frustration...

...He knows that soon the boy's life will become difficult, and he hopes that conformity might be his savior...

...Clearly, Alex has to grow up...

...It may be perverse to compare the multiethnic, feminist Smith to the xenophobic, sexist Amis...

...He had tried it before...

...But great prose is ultimately about style, rather than politics...

...With one of the boys who had accompanied him on the day of his father's death (he seems to have scarcely moved beyond his childhood circle), he tries meditating on the letters of the Hebrewalphabet and on the 10 sefirot (divine structures), but to no avail...

...Even his (black, Jewish) girlfriend looks better from a distance...

...A longhaired sprite...

...What did the rabbi say to the Pope...

...He wants him to be part of this everybody...

...Dat's why he made a hol' heap of fuss about de children of men building de tower of Babel...

...Half a menorah...

...The wrestling trip is part of a plan to make the conspicuous Alex more like other kids...

...Smith stirred the melting pot and set it on boil...

...It would be a terrible waste if she were to develop into nothing more significant than the Nick Hornby of the diaspora...

...This poor mite has nothing going for him except a hobby, autograph collecting, that impresses the other boys only for its capitalist potential...

...Parents are dead or absent, leaving the kids with London all to themselves, give or take a haunting memory or two...

...You want to know something...

...It is a younger book all around...

...A sleeping fetus...

...When Alex' father collapses after the match, the outing hardens under the weight of its significance, and comes to shape Alex' future...

...no good could come of it...

...The best passages suggest a brilliant future, but much of it reads as if it were written hastily, with the requirements of some other slapstick medium, like film, in mind...

...How funny is the book...

...What came out was a very superior comestible...

...Small when he popped out and small to this day...

...he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again...

...In these introductory scenes the author displays the more traditional of her narrative skills to poignant effect, particularly when describing the doomed father's attempts to prepare his son for fatherlessness...

...Didn't I tell you he's a weed...

...Fat bloody chance...

...This was encouraging...

...Nonviolent light...

...The book, written while Smith was an undergraduate at Cambridge, contained a few young and beautiful characters, but they were not nearly as entertaining as, say, the heavily accented granny, a Jehovah's Witness certain of God's views on most things, including miscegenation: "Black and white never come to no good...

...He chews his food 20 times a bite, thinking it will build him up...

...He wanted to meet her for the first time, over and over...

...It's A sweet story, with more forward momentum and plot than White Teeth...

...Reviewed by Sarah Harrison Smith Freelance writer and critic Zadie Smith is so young (26) and so beautiful (think of a Caribbean Scheherazade) that it is difficult to believe she was the author of White Teeth, a novel largely about aging, dissatisfied immigrants living in England...

...Send him back...

...A crown...

...When you mix it up, nuttin' good can come...

...He felt bad...

...De Lord Jesus never meant us to mix it up...

...A table...

...A trip to New York, and the discovery there of a down-on-her-luck star of the old silver screen offer him the chance to move beyond the symbols he cherishes to the difficult world of the real and animate...

...Her prose can be too lazy for truly hilarious effect, though, as when she describes her hero waking up after a bad three days spent in the thrall of an illegal little pill: "You're either for me or against me, thought Alex-Li Tandem, referring to the daylight, and more generally, to the day...

...Alex-Li Tandem, the protagonist, is the child of a Chinese doctor (of Western medicine) and a Jewish hippie mother...

...Yes, doctor, yes, I want to be her fan...

...A moment later he was surprised to feel a flush of warm light dappled over him, filtered through a blind...

...He has an Albert Einstein worth £3,000...

...Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way...

...Smith has moments of such tremendous style that one hopes she will arrange her next writing to more consistently suit her strengths...