Zadie Smith became a famous author at the ripe old age of twenty-four, with the publication of her first novel, White Teeth (2000). Since that time she has published numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, all of which deal with issues of race, class, and politics. Others have said this, and I agree: Smith's books are reminiscent of certain novels by Charles Dickens. They may leave me feeling troubled or sad, but they also provide plenty of laughs and bursts of insight to brighten my reading way.
In fact, Charles Dickens is a featured character in The Fraud (2023), which happens to be Smith's most recent and first historical novel. Set in Victorian England, The Fraud is primarily told through the point of view of a Scottish woman, Eliza Touchet, who, much like Smith, is canny and intelligent, and has a lot to say about the company she keeps. Having fallen on hard times, Eliza has become the housekeeper of her cousin-through-marriage, William Ainsworth, a lesser known writer and friend of Dickens. To say their relationship is complicated is an understatement, but then so is Eliza's relationship with Ainsworth's first wife.
This novel, with its shifts in time period and point of view, is complicated too, and it is a challenging read. It is a novel about writing and a novel about society—what's truthful and good and what's fraudulent and bad in both. How does Victorian England mirror the world today? Let Zadie Smith count the ways. When The Fraud diverts its attention from the ups and downs of the Ainsworth household to the rise and decline of the British Empire, she does just that. Enter Andrew Bogle, who grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. Bogle, now in London, finds himself the primary witness in the celebrated "Tichborne Trial," in which a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title. Eliza, like most of the nation, becomes absorbed in the spectacle of the trial, to the point that she attends it and then invites Bogle to dinner and listens to his story of enslavement and self-emancipation. She seems transformed by his tale, and what she learns from the circus that is the trial, but is she? You'll have to read The Fraud, by Zadie Smith, to find out.