Fiction on Trial

Is there anything worse than a novel? Is there anyone more vain, more laughable, more exploitative yet morally self-serious than the novelist? Or, as the protagonist of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel puts it: “ ‘Oh what does it matter what that man thinks of anything? He’s a novelist!’ Without meaning to, she had spoken in the same tone with which one might say He’s a child.”

The Fraud opens with an uneasy meeting on a novelist’s doorstep in 19th-century London. A “filthy boy” stands at the entrance to a respectable home in Tunbridge Wells, face-to-face with a formidable, black-haired Scottish woman. She is Eliza Touchet, the cousin of William Ainsworth, the novelist, and she has called the boy to fix a crater that has opened up in the house. The second-floor library has caved in under the weight of an absurd number of books, dumping plaster and volumes of British history all over the downstairs parlor.

Inspecting the damage, the boy is disapproving: “The sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.” When Eliza readily agrees, the boy feels a flicker of anxiety. “Was she laughing at him? Perhaps ‘literature’ was the wrong word. Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong.” He says no more and kneels to measure the size of the hole.

The metaphor is not subtle. This will be a book about the dead weight of literature; the saggy, impractical, possibly elitist enterprise of revering it; the ambivalences and frustrations involved in making it; the embarrassing excess of it all. This will also be a novel about the fear of using the “wrong word,” or the right word the wrong way,