NW Study Guide

Zadie Smith was born “Sadie Smith” in 1975 in Willesden, a neighborhood of Northwest London. Her father, Harvey Smith, was a white Englishman, while her mother, Yvonne Bailey, was a recent immigrant to England from Jamaica. When she was 14, Smith changed her first name from “Sadie” to “Zadie.”  Smith’s parents divorced when she was a teenager. Smith studied English literature at King’s College, Cambridge, where she met her future husband, the novelist and poet Nick Laird. Not long after graduating, she published White Teeth, a novel that had substantial interest before publication and which went on to become a well-reviewed bestseller. While Smith’s first novel presented an exaggerated and at times farcical view of life in Britain, by the time she published NW in 2012, Smith’s work increasingly leaned toward realism, even as its narrative style was often experimental. Smith continues to write and lives in Northwest London with her husband, with whom she has two children.

Northwest London, where almost all of NW is set, is also the place where Zadie Smith grew up and spent much of her life. Some events referenced in passing in the novel are the global financial crisis and the Great Recession, which occurred from about 2007 to 2009 and continued to have effects long after. These events play out in the background as many of the characters in the novel face uncertain employment or housing situations due to a lack of opportunity in the unstable economy. A less recent historical event that nevertheless still has a huge impact on the novel is the establishment of council houses (public housing) in Britain. These buildings were constructed by the government starting around the turn of the twentieth century with the goal of improving living conditions for working-class people and were originally intended for people from a wider economic range, not just the lowest income levels. Many characters in the novel voice the belief that people who live in poverty have done something to “deserve” it, a view the novel frequently portrays as hypocritical. This view echoes the beliefs of British conservatives like Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s and 1980s. During Thatcher’s time as prime minister, the government introduced extensive deregulation and privatization into public housing, which many historians today see as the biggest factors leading to a decline in the quality of life in the council estates, leading to conditions like the ones portrayed in NW.

NW is Smith’s fourth novel, and like her earlier novels White Teeth and On Beauty, it explores the intersection of race and class, particularly when people from different social groups find themselves forced to interact. One of the most significant influences on NW is James Joyce, who wrote about his home city of Dublin in much the same way that Smith writes about Northwest London. Joyce’s books Dubliners and Ulysses are full of references to urban geography, including the names of specific streets and local landmarks. Ulysses in particular has an experimental style that changes with each chapter (similar to how narrative style in NW changes with each section), and Ulysses’ focus on a single day recalls the focus in NW on one carnival night that ties all the different threads of the story together. Another famous novel based around a single day in London is Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Wolf, which helped pioneer and popularize stream of consciousness, a narrative style in which characters’ thoughts blend together with narration, which Smith uses extensively in NW. Other writers who have been a major influence on Smith include Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire), E. M. Forster (Howards End), and Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God).