I love reading.  “So many books, so little time,” is my mantra.  I have been a member of the Prime Time for Women book club for a number of years, and it has happily introduced me to authors/books I had not read previously, especially fiction, since I tended to gravitate towards non-fiction, biographies, and memoirs in the past.

Therefore, it was with a bit of horror that I read a review of Zadie Smith’s book The Fraud in the October 2023 The Atlantic.  The review, titled “Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction,” was written by Jordan Kisner.

The Fraud is historical fiction, visiting the lives of William Ainsworth, a 19^th Century novelist and his cousin and housekeeper, Eliza Touchet.  The novel opens with a young man who has come to the house to fix the floor of the second story library that has collapsed under the weight of the books it contains.  The young man observes, “the sheer weight of literature will put a strain on a house.”

Kinsner says in her review that Smith’s book is about just this topic — the dead weight of literature: “the saggy, impractical, possibly elitist enterprise of revering it; the ambivalences and frustrations in making it; the embarrassing excess of it all.”   In a 2019 essay in The New York Review of Books Smith indicates that the glory days of fiction have passed and asks how viable the genre is today.  Smith is not alone in her outlook.  New York Times critic Dwight Garner advances the same argument, that “literature is dead.”

In The Fraud Smith takes the points she makes in her 2019 essay into the novelist arena (a bit ironic) and uses two people who actually existed in the 19^th Century literature world as the vessels to expand on her points about the decline and hypocrisy of fiction.  Eliza makes this point when she says Dickens is not an “ethical social commentator”, discussing big issues such poverty, slavery, power, greed, class and cultural disputes but is, instead, manifesting his own “personal obsessions, desires and ego.”

True to the title, this book is about multiple frauds and fraudsters:  Ainsworth, who is overrated as a writer but considers himself a famous and important author; Charles Dickens, who is masquerading as someone who is concerned about the poor but is using them for his own artistic purposes; and Eliza, who has no respect for writers or literature but sets out to write her own novel.  Overall, one could argue that the book is mostly about the fraud of novelists and literature in general.

Kisner says Smith is particularly concerned with how novelists use language.  Those novelists who can use language entertainingly or persuasively she equates to “the politician’s and the swindler’s” prowess at such skill.  Kisner says that Smith is “uneasy about the indistinct boundary between the person who uses words to make art and the one who uses words to manipulate others for power.”

Wow, a lot to process in Kisner’s review.  As someone who enjoys reading more than almost anything else (well, there is breathing and eating), this review was maddening.  I agree that some novels are not very good but, somehow, get published and, unfortunately, weigh down a number of bookshelves.  I also agree that there is an embarrassing excess in today’s world of what is described as literature but is really just pulp and feeds into the author’s ego.  But to intimate that literature today is dead is, I feel, a bridge too far.  Garner indicates that Smith’s 2000 novel, White Teeth, was probably the last novel that “mattered.”  What about all of the Booker Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award honorees in the 21^st Century?  Are we to believe that none of these authors’ contributions rise to the level of high literature?

And, I would go so far as to argue that even if a book is not great literature but offers a pleasant experience for the reader, takes them outside their daily lives, engages them in a compelling mystery or romance, it is worthwhile.  Such a book may not be a Lord of the Flies, or The Great Gatsby, or The Catcher in the Rye, or Madam Bovary, etc. etc. but if a given book uplifts the reader in some way, it has value.  Sometimes “less than” books are the entry portal for a new reader into the great literature of the world.  How glorious.