Zadie Smith's NW: Classic Modernism for the 21st Century

Almost 90 years ago, T.S. Eliot reviewed James Joyce's newest novel Ulysses with a huge amount of praise for its experimental style, noting that it's challenging structure acted as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” For those of you unsure of the exact impetus of the movement that came to be known as Modernism (which is all of us - even, I suspect, people who hold Phd's on the subject, as it is so determinedly slippery and elusive), a rough approximation is that its practitioners wrote as a backlash to what came before: challenging representation at a time, following the First World War, that the world was reeling from a global conflict so totally devastating and insidious, that all felt that the world had fundamentally changed for the worse. A classic, and to my mind insurmountable piece of work reflecting this was Eliot's own poem 'The Wasteland': possibly the bleakest piece of poetry engaging with the state of the world ever written. 

Another face of Modernism, which I feel Zadie Smith allies herself more closely to in NW came in the form of writers such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and E.M. Forster, whose main projects focused on the representation of the psyche; more self-aware and seemingly fragmented than before. In NW, she probes the psyches of interconnected NW residents, exploring the transition from adolescence to terrifying adult life with its pressures and complexity. What I really liked about NW, as in Zadie's previous novels, were the pithy aphorisms about life lived in the 21st century. Where it's different to her previous works is the determined change of register between narratives: for philosophy graduate Leah, the narrative is meandering, ponderous, measured: for sharp yet confused lawyer turned urbane yummy-mummy Natalie, her observations are organised into note-form - titled and brief, to help compile the case later. The allusions may be to our everyday; the slightly stereotypical characters drawn from cultural currency, but the form and the spirit is purely, classically Modernist. She's observing the world through the same prism as the Bloomsbury set; which could be an unbearable and alienating exercise, but, come on, it's Zadie. It's good. And a lot more fun that Mrs Dalloway.