The Issue of Social Misfortunes in Zadie Smith’s NW

Social justice is one of the most relevant topics of today. When it comes to 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement, the refugee crisis, gun violence, and voting rights are some of the most prevalent and talked about social justice issues. On a global scale, these topics matter. In ​NW​ by Zadie Smith, the topic of social injustice comes up. More specifically, racial, sexual orientation, and gender injustices. Following the lives of four characters living in Northwest London, ​NW​ develops a common theme of social injustice and socioeconomic differences throughout. The differences between the way the characters live depend completely on race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic statuses. ​NW​ begins with Leah who is scammed by a drug addict and questions about her sexuality begin to bubble up. She is dealing with a husband who wants children with her when she doesn’t want children herself. Leah is lost and unfulfilled in her marriage. The reader then meets Felix who is a recovering drug addict going to meet up with his ex in order to sever ties and start fresh. On his way home, Felix is killed in a robbery. Natalie is the next character to be followed. She is a young girl, originally named Keisha, who achieved every goal she ever set for herself. She is married and a successful lawyer. However, Natalie is living a double life; she meets up with swinger couples that she meets online. Natalie’s husband eventually discovers her affairs and calls her out. Natalie spends the night wandering around the city where she runs into Nathan who stops her from jumping off a bridge. Later, Natalie and Leah are discussing their issues when the news tells about a robbery turned murder. They instantly know that Nathan, who was acting suspicious around Natalie, had something to do with it. Zadie Smith’s ​NW offers an insightful overview of social issues that the city of London experiences regularly.

In ​NW, N​atalie and Leah have known each other for years. The story introduces them as young girls. Leah had saved Natalie from drowning and they had been friends ever since. “In introducing the reader to the two friends as girls, Smith takes care to represent the things girls do, while not relinquishing the oppor- tunity for real pedagogic reflection on what girls usually do wrong” (Taylor 1) By introducing Leah and Natalie as young girls, Smith allows the reader to understand why the women are the way that they are in their adult years. It explains a little bit more about why exactly they experience the things that they do as they grow up. For example, Natalie changed her name from Keisha. Growing up black, Natalie believed that her roots would cause her not to be able to go far in life. In changing her name from her Jamacan “Keisha”, Natalie removed that important piece of herself.

For Leah, she struggles with the guilt of taking her own birth control pills. Her husband is made to believe that she stopped taking them in order for them to conceive, but Leah is too scared to tell him that she does not want kids. She keeps it a secret. However, growing up Leah always was struggling with her sexualtity. This is a very good explanation as to why she would be so scared to tell him. It also gives the reader a better understanding of what people can be expected to do based on the ways they act. Her “various encounters with the scamming drug addict Shar, following an early incident in the novel, plunges her in a soul-searching mood that makes her revisit her adolescent attraction to women. Her marriage does not fulfil all her sexual and emotional needs… Leah encounters Shar yet again in the company of Michel, and in her internal world she starts fantasising” (Alberto 1) Leah’s experience with scamming drug addict Shar causes her to dive into uncertainty concerning her sexualtiy. These emotions are ones that are resurfacing from her childhood. It allows her to see that her marriage isn’t fulfilling her and that she needs to do some soul searching. When seeing Shar again, Leah sees her with “A neat waist you want to hold. She is something beautiful in the sunshine, something between boy and girl, reminding Leah of a time in her own life when she had not yet been called upon to make a final decision about all that. Desire is never final, desire is imprecise and impractical” (Smith 1). Here it is clear that Leah is struggling with her identity.

Obviously, for Leah it falls apart as well. When Michael finds out that Leah is talking her pills it is a drastic breakdown. Michael clearly wants children when saying, “‘Things change! We’re getting there, no?’ The woman does not know where there is. She did not know they had set off, nor in which direction the wind is blowing. She does not want to arrive. The truth is she had believed they would be naked in these sheets forever and nothing would come to them ever, nothing but satisfaction. Why must love ‘move forward’? Which way is forward?” (Smith 2). He is much more focused on advancing in life both materially and economically by having children. However, Leah doesn’t understand his need for change and progress; she can’t see why they can’t just live in the present.

Leah and Natalie are connected through some of the strongest bonds, “by allowing these two characters to connect through memory and death, Smith is building a bridge between different experiences of migration to the metropolis that are only deemed dissimilar because of persisting perceptions of racial difference” (Alberto 2). In NW, Smith’s depiction of friendship begins from a place of self-determination that involves love and acceptance of differences (Taylor 2). The differences between two friends do not determine if they love each other. In fact, the things that you hate about yourself may just be the things your friends love about you. NW explores the differences between two friends when following the relationship of Leah and Natalie. Natalie and Leah are the bridge that majorly interlinks racial and social differences in NW. By connecting the girls through traumatic memories such as death, Smith builds these links. The relationship between the girls “is marked by a tempered understanding of what friends can be expected to do and by temporal and situational ebbs and flows of connection, frustration, and separateness” (Taylor 3). The relationship between Natalie and Leah shows how the differences between two friends can cause their lives to go in two different directions.

Smith does this to show the socioeconomic differences between the different areas and how they are held. In NW, “Smith makes the more fundamental argument that once a human being has been transformed into “an ensemble of entrepreneurial and investment capital”, the ability to empathize is severely damaged.” (Houser 2) After developing into a blue collar worker, one loses the ability to empathize. This is probably due to the fact that jobs such as investment and entrepreneurship is such a cutthroat area of expertise. It is either “kill or get killed” in a sense. It leads the people who work in this industry to, in a sense, care only for themselves. They have reprogrammed themselves to act this way and with these people having all of the money, they in turn have all of the power and more opportunities than those who are less fortunate. Their cutthroat attitude creates a lack of empathy within this middle/upper class. The lack of empathy tends to cause those individuals who hold power to prevent those who don’t from gaining more power and opportunities.

Another big social justice issue in ​NW​ is drug abuse. Felix is a recovering drug addict trying to get his life together. Not only is he trying to get his life together, he is trying to leave that part of him behind. When coming home from saying a final goodbye to his ex, Felix is killed in a robbery gone wrong. This feels like one of the realest things in this novel, “Felix’s section is the only part of NW that invites a reader response of empathy” (Houser 1). The only section of NW that invokes empathy is Felix’s section due to the tragic story he holds. The reader feels bad due to the fact that he was trying to get better for himself and for the ones he loved however it was cut short when he was murdered. The realness that this scene holds is almost scary. The fact that this could happen in real life and that it probably has is what leads the reader to feel this empathy. This is something that is real in a lot of people’s lives. Whether it be a friend, family member, acquaintance, or just hearing it on the news, death and murder is a reality. Felix’s life is cut short just as he is trying to get it back on track. The irony behind this is uncanny and “There are times when the ironies of fiction cannot match those that reality provides” (Enright 1). Fictional irony is never going to live up to what life throws at you. That is, there is no way that fictional irony can be any worse than what is experienced by people in the real world. Due to the fact that this is something that can and probably has happened, this irony is matched by real world irony. In NW, Felix is told that life is not a video game, “there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is that everybody dies at the end. Game Over” (Smith 2). This irony is harsh, painful, and life ruining especially in the context of Felix’s character.

Socioeconomic differences is a huge aspect of Smith’s ​NW. T​ he differences in the four main characters and how they grew up has affected how they are as adults. This representation of postcolonial northwest London “is not the London of Boswell, Johnson, Dickens, or Woolf, even though the area is expansive enough to encompass many ideas of what it means to live in this space at this particular time” (Slavin 1). Smith’s version of NW London is completely different from that of “classic” authors such as Charles Dickens for example. This area is vast enough to represent all of the author’s ideas of what it looks like; however, Smith’s idea is most likely due to the fact that it is the most modern. Smith’s version shows a more accurate representation of the different areas of Northwest London and how the affluence of different neighborhoods affected society. NW “moves geographically from the estates of north-west London to affluent central areas of the city and includes a visit to his Felix’s father’s council-estate flat, a meeting with a young upper-middle-class white man trying to sell his father’s sports car, and a visit to Felix’s drug addict ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Westminster. As in that earlier tradition, Smith uses these encounters to examine socio-cultural contexts of contemporary urban life, with respect to discourses of class, gender and ethnicity. The adoption of a realist style, then, seems to be appropriate to Smith’s subject matter in this section of the novel.” (Bentley 1) NW goes from the lower class areas of Northwest London to the affluent areas.

Smith supports the comonly believed cognitive map that “insists that places like Willesden and Kilburn are somehow not truly “English” in the same way as the village or Marylebone. This map is false, of course; there is no such thing as “true” English or British stock…” (Slavin 2) People try to map out the places they live/have lived based off of the things they’ve seen happen there or their experiences in that place. For example, different parts of England are seen as more “English” than others based on the way they look or the way the people who live there act. This is completely based on media representations of England and how it is supposed to look. However, one town is not inherently more English than another. These cognitive maps are going to be different for everyone, especially for those who grew up and/or live in that area. For example, “Leah and Natalie’s mappings of northwest London are also interesting to consider in the light of postcolonial geographics of the city, because the women are considered “other” and from “elsewhere.” (Slavin 3) Natalie and Leah will have a completely different representation, or map, in the area of which they live. This is because women are going to have completely different experiences than men will. The women are considered weird and are outcasts. This will change the way they view their homes. For example, women will see a bar and remember that as the place that they were assaulted. However, a man can see a bar and see it as their favorite place to spend Saturday nights with the boys. It is all a matter of your own experiences and how you remember the places around you. Smith’s novel “uses metamodernist characteristics (that is, a commitment to psychological accuracy, affective detachment from totalizing ideologies and stylistic experimentation) to resist a monolithic conception of Britishness. This resistance to normativity is articulated at the crossroads between postcolonial and queer discourses, a joint battleground that dissolves a singular envisioning of national identity by favouring the mixing of cultural perspectives and sexualities” (Alberto 3). NW mixes cultures and perspectives which allows the reader to open their minds and drop the perspective of “Britishness” that the media displays.

NW b​y Zadie Smith gives a perceptive overview of social issues that citizens in London undergo time and again. Whether it is racism, homophoia, socioeconomic issues, or drugs, there are so many different issues that people need to realize are big in London. The stereotypical “Britishness” isn’t all that England has to offer and the country is not just some proper and fancy. There are real issues in other countries that are seen as peaceful and proper and fancy and rich. There are still people who are struggling to get by. They feel as though they have to rob people in order to survive. There will always be people who don’t feel as though they fit in. They will change the parts of themselves that they hate the most in order to feel as though they finally do fit in. There are people everywhere that experience homophobia. They will be terrified to become who they really are. They will hide it for as long as they can. There will always be people who get hooked on drugs. It is nature; as long as they exist, people will get hooked. They will hunt for that high as long as they can. There needs to be something done for every single one of these issues but nothing can be done until people realize that it’s not just third world countries and it’s not just in America. There is worldwide issue when it comes to these topics. Once people realize this, there can be change. However, one should ask themselves, how can I help?

Works Cited

Alberto, Fernández C. “On Being Queer and Postcolonial: Reading Zadie Smith’s Nw Through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. 51.1 (2016): 76–91. Print.

Bentley, Nick. “Trailing Postmodernism: David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Zadie Smith’s NW, and the Metamodern.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, vol. 99, no. 7–8, Nov. 2018, pp. 723–743. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/0013838X.2018.1510611.

Enright, A. (2012, Sep 23). Mind the gap. New York Times Book Review, , 11-BR.11. Retrieved from

https://ezproxy.naz.edu/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.naz.edu/do cview/1080808313?accountid=28167

Houser, Tammy Amiel. “Zadie Smith’s NW: Unsettling the Promise of Empathy.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 2017, pp. 116–148. EBSCOhost, doi:10.3368/cl.58.1.116.

Slavin, Molly. “Nowhere and Northwest, Brent and Britain: Geographies of Elsewhere in Zadie Smith’s NW.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language
Association, vol. 48, no. 1, 2015, pp. 97–119. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=cookie,ip,shib&db=mzh &AN=2016390193&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Smith, Zadie. NW. Isis, 2014.

Taylor, Judith. “Beyond ‘Obligatory Camaraderie’: Girls’ Friendship in Zadie Smith’s NW and Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim.” Feminist Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2016, pp. 445–468. EBSCOhost, doi:10.15767/feministstudies.42.2.0445.