Search results for "The Autograph Man"

‘Just keep on walking in a straight line': allowing for chance in Zadie Smith's overdetermined London (White Teeth, The Autograph Man and On Beauty)

2008

International audience; Zadie Smith's three novels signal a sullen yet coherent evolution in the representation of both real and fictional London. Each of the three texts reveals a threefold failure in the way the city can become the ideal place for the characters to know and fulfil themselves. London is first a mere topographical and cultural gridlock: its neighbourhoods are overdetermined in a way that leads to the negation of the individual, leaving no space for action and banning any type of self-improvement. Yet Smith's London in White Teeth is not as coded as often claimed, and may provide some tools to pervert this conditioning of places and people. The novels indeed examine the dyna…