NW: A Novel

Good writer, but the setting never came to life and the characters were not sufficiently involving. I kept waiting for the various story lines to converge and when they did at the end it was anticlimactic.

Contrary to the many reviews, this novel left me cold. While the writing style was interesting, I felt the author was "reaching" trying to establish synchronization of text with story line. The whole thing left me cold. Very little character development of four unhappy 30 somethings who grew up in the same postal code, NW, all unhappy people who made some poor choices.

Wanted to love this novel, but found the characters hard to get to know and - to be honest - I didn't really want to get to know them any better. Found the writing quite stilted and dense, but dense without any sense of satisfaction when I did finally manage to navigate through it. Love the premise, the location, and Zadie's previous work, but haven't been able to finish NW.

Zadie Smith frustrates me. I loved "On Beauty". I tried once with "White Teeth" and had to put it down, but coming back to it a few years later I was utterly engaged. I couldn't make much progress with "NW". I think it's a language issue with much of the first few chapters written in the dialect of the characters.

I found the book boring to read - too fragmented, making it hard to get involved. The characters don't stand out and the environment is commonplace, nothing new. Poverty, drugs, prostitution, abuse, swearing - not my first choice. The only part I found easy to read was a day in the life of Felix - at least there was some continuity but after his stabbing I was left wondering until he was briefly mentioned much later in the book.

I found the simplicity of the characters unbelievable. Also unbelievable was how terrible British culture is in this book. There were several sections that had inventive writing, but the pieces did not come together as if the author could not determine what she was writing about.

Heard her interviewed on radio and was impressed with her articulateness and keen sense of observation. However, the book did not manage to keep me engaged and I gave up half-way through. As a firm Anglophile, I was hoping for more.

Like many people, I enjoy Zadie Smith's earlier work, but I found this horrible. I couldn't make it past 40 pages. Saw my barrista with it and asked what she thought. She told me the same thing. We are very different people so I think that many Zadie Smith readers are not a fan of this one.

Forget any poopy reviews you read on this latiest Zadie-wonder. She is once again great--filled with a sense of place and the people this particular geography produces. Very engaging. She is truly one of our best writers.

To my opinion, Zadie Smith wrote one absolutely-amazing-ten-stars book (White Teeth), a very good one("On Beaty") and a pretty horrible one ("Autograph Man"). "NW" finds its place in between, and I would qualify it as "moderately bad". For those familiar with her previous work, here are two things you need to know: 1) the writing is still very good, 2) the plot is nowhere near her best results. Actually, there's no plot at all: published reviews claim it's a tale about people who are not connected from the first sight, but in the end you find that they're unexpectedly and beatufully linked. This type of plot is the one I have a special fondness towards, and this is also why I was so frustrated to find that no, guys, they do not link. The only connection between them is that they populate north west London, where Smith herself was born and raised. Maybe describing a spirit of the neighbourhood feels to me like a strange and insufficient reason to write a whole book because I am a foreigner and I don't have a clue about difference between London districts, nor have a special interest in the topic. Maybe people who have been on these streets, or know people who have, or are in any other way incorporated in modern British society would find something refreshing, dearly familiar and utterly catching in this whole theme. I just have to say that I haven't learned anything new about people, feelings, relationship or humanity in this book, which is sad, because it was what made "White Teeth" and "On Beauty" special for me and it's what I raised my hopes for. After finishing this one, I surely know numbers of the buses cruising in north-west London, and this seem to be all the positive income I've got.

This book has an interesting subject but has a difficult writing style to follow. Had I known it would be like that I would not have bought it. As it is, I am going to wait a while to read it, because read it I shall, and see if I am of a frame of mind to wade through it.

I tried reading this and gave up around page 75. Well, it was on my Kindle so I'm really not sure exactly where I left off. At first I felt stupid - that I didn't get it - because there were so many positive reviews. Then I resigned myself to the fact I prefer books that make sense and that's not a bad thing.

This book begins so well, so engagingly --i'm involved with the characters, the situation, i'm recommending it to all my friends. Then it switches to a whole other story, and i think, well, okay, I can follow this, then that story just sort of ends, and we get a whole bunch of little post-modern snippets with cutesy literarily-allusive titles, and I lose it, I stop reading. I did finish listening to it, because the reader was great, and I did love the voice, and I appreciate the sense of neighborhood and what I think Smith was trying to say about identity in the modern world, etc etc; but I put the book down, because I just didn't give a damn about the characters or what happened to them.

I read somewhere that Smith got a PhD in literature. Novelists should stay away from literary theory. Way far away.

I can enjoy almost any literary genre and writer, but I just could not get into this book. I didn't like the writing style; I didn't care about the wimpy lead character; and gave up after a few chapters.

I have been in book group for over fifteen years. After choosing this book, it was unanimously decided we now have a new gold standard for TERRIBLE. Do not waste your time attempting to read this misguided attempt to make you care about the confusing charactersor the ill defined plot. A real stinker

No plot. Just a bunch of people meandering through life in NW London. Not even well written. Just random thoughts. Anyone who says anything different is likely just trying to appear "literally cool". No pun intended.

Zadie Smith is one of the most talented writers of English prose, and NW is her finest piece of work since White Teeth. She seamlessly interweaves the stories of four struggling denizens of London's NW neighborhood, above all capturing with a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue the snap and pop of street speech. Others - including the reliably clueless Michiko Kakutani of the NYT - have not liked the occasional experiments in form embedded in the novel. Pay them no mind: Smith returns here with a Dickensian irrepressibility and razor-sharp social commentary.

Considering all the positive reviews I was astonished by how little I liked this novel, and as it wound toward its conclusion, grew almost to despise it. A Smith novel, after White Teeth, is and should be a literary event. But this novel reads more like a Masters fiction thesis than anything by the writer of White Teeth. Its varied 4-part narrative structure, exploration of themes, and character development all work in tandem to disassemble its ambition.

Its experimental narrative structure and style explores 4 major character, two women and two men. Each section is stylistically distinct - but the two narratives that make up the bulk of the book (Leah and Natalie consume roughly 70% of the novel) are fractured in a way which makes it harder to connect and understand the characters and their motivations for making decisions. Leah's narrative is formed with staccato sentences ("Water shortage. Food wars. Strain A-H5N1. Manhattan slips into the sea. England freezes."), while Natalie's life story is wrought through mostly brief paragraphs/sections. It makes for some difficult, unrewarding reading.

The creative and experimental narrative in and of itself is not the cause of unrewarding nature of the book. In addition, it cynically and superficially explores its themes. Leah's section is predictably contemptible of Natalie's money and class, while her motivations for not wanting children remain an illusive mystery. Natalie is predictably bored with her upper-middle class marriage but goes to such incredible extremes and perils to escape it that it becomes incredibly out of character, and Smith does barely any justice to explaining it. How are we to understand and know and enjoy spending time with these characters when they are crafted in such a fractured, superficial, unsympathetic way?

The males of the novel feel more like an afterthought, written more for balance than anything else. Their narrative (each have the same issues as Leah's and Natalie's) problems are only exacerbated due to their brevity.

Ultimately the book doesn't read like Smith has any sympathy or caring for her characters - they feel more like vessels for her to observe and snipe through ("they thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalism"). With so many great authors releasing books this fall, save your precious reading time for another.

The primary characters in Zadie Smith's new novel -- residents of North West London, from which the title derives -- are dissected and analyzed, or more often skewered, as Smith lays bare their hypocrisies, ambitions, facades, insecurities, prejudices, and fears. The four central characters stand on different rungs of the social ladder. The impact of class and social identity on relationships is the novel's central theme, why some people rise above their beginnings and others don't is the central question, but -- setting aside those social issues -- I enjoyed NW for the portrait it paints of troubled individuals coming to terms with their changing lives.

Leah Hanwell, 35, is married to an African named Michel. Leah has a love/hate relationship with Michel, and also with her friend Natalie (formerly Keisha), a barrister whose upward mobility (assisted by marriage to a prosperous money manager) has eluded her childhood friends. Just as J-Lo tried some years ago to convince her audience that she was still "Jenny from the block," Natalie is experiencing something of an identity crisis. Having shed the name Keisha, she still clings to her past, at least to Leah, whose attendance at Natalie's posh parties seems designed to contrast Natalie's humble beginnings to her current status. Although Leah has done well for herself, earning a degree and finding employment with a nonprofit, she remains tongue-tied in the company of educated professionals (Natalie invites Leah to tell stories and then gladly tells them for her) and is embarrassed by Michel's sincerity (but only when they are in public). Leah also seems envious of and disquieted by Natalie's children.

A couple of lesser characters haven't made the same progress as Natalie and Leah. Nathan Bogle, the recipient of Leah's childhood crush, is mired in a slang-filled, weed-smoking life, a life on the streets that is dedicated solely to survival. His role in the novel is to teach Natalie that she knows nothing about his social class despite attending the same school when they were both ten. Nathan knows Natalie has "made it" because she can squander her tears on something as insignificant as a distressed marriage; she has left more fundamental worries behind. Yet for all her success and despite Nathan's complaint that she is needlessly self-pitying, Natalie feels trapped by her circumstances. Her desperate sadness motivates foolish behavior.

Positioned somewhere between Nathan and Leah on the ladder of success is Felix Cooper, whose Jamaican father lives in the West End. Felix craves the freedom of a better life in the North West with Grace (half Jamaican, half Nigerian), who wants to free him of his "negative energy." While interesting and well written, Felix's story seems out of place, having only a tangential connection to the rest of the novel.

Readers who cannot abide unconventional writing might dislike NW. Each of the novel's sections is written in a different style. Dialog is often (but not always) set apart in condensed paragraphs; in the first section, quotation marks are nonexistent. Sentences, like the thoughts they reflect, are sometimes incomplete or scattered. One passage is written as free-form poetry; another as an online chat. The largest chunk of the novel is written as a series of vignettes, scenes that deftly sketch out Leah's and Natalie's lives from their childhood to the present. One section follows Natalie as she takes a long walk through the North West; it is divided into subsections ("Hampstead to Archway") like a guide to a walking tour. I enjoyed the different styles -- they aren't particularly daring and they don't make the novel inaccessible -- but readers who favor a straightforward narrative might be put off by the jarring changes in format.

As we have come to expect from Zadie Smith, much of the story is wryly amusing, if not laugh-out-loud funny. Her description of "marriage as the art of invidious comparison" is one of many sly observations I admired. Smith's prose is as graceful and unpredictable as a tumbleweed. The pace is relaxed, not slow but unhurried. In a good way, the story is slightly meandering. Smith takes her time, developing the characters and their surroundings bit by bit until it all becomes real.

I suspect that readers who dislike Jonathan Franzen's most recent novels will dislike NW for the same reasons: there isn't much of a plot and the characters aren't always likable (although Smith's characters aren't as determinedly self-centered as Franzen's). Both writers strive to say something about society at large by focusing on smaller segments, families and friends who are defined by geography and class. Readers who believe that good writing often illuminates the world as it exists, not as we want it to be, that it is just as important to understand flaws as perfection, will find much to admire in Smith's surgical exploration of characters struggling to come to grips with their changing lives. To my mind, NW is a fine, fun, five star novel.

With great sadness, I write this one star review of Zadie Smith's novel, NW. I read On Beauty years ago a loved it. I still believe Ms. Smith is an exceptionally talented writer. But the unconventional format of this novel was just too hard to follow. Ms. Smith writes without punctuation, without quotation marks, without telling you who is speaking. Many sentences lack verbs, some just one or two words long. I recognize this literary technique may be bold and non-traditional, but I found it a major barrier to my enjoyment. I felt like I was solving a riddle as I read (Who said that? What does that mean?) instead of falling into the story. I hope Zadie Smith tries again. I hope she returns to a more traditional style so that her beautiful writing and character development can shine.

This one really missed the mark for me. I gave up, sadly, after chapter 10. I just couldn't slog through it anymore.

I was so tempted to stop reading this book because I did not like any of the characters in it. I guess I just didn't get it. I thought it would show the flavor of NW instead it was about a bunch of sorry people I cared nothing about.

Zadie smith wrote ONE good book. White teeth. Then she wrote " On Beauty" also insightful and clever ... but OH MY GOD did fame get to her head or what? I am travelling so cant buy english Books easily. This was the biggest waste of time ever. She is so busy dropping cool terms and cool places and Ooh ooh she cant write about sex ( who cant?)...
no i was soooooooooo bored. I would rather look at the mould on the ceiling of the dorm in Prague where i read this than BEAR to try and work out of there is AQNY point to it. I've gotta say this- its hard top be pretentious and boring at the same time. Many of us have wasted years on drugs or has indiscriminate sex or have known racism.. but that doesnt mean its sooooo exotic you can just fill pages of plotless MISERY with it and expect anyone to CARE !!! The story began witha woman being pregnant. I sped read the last 80% hoping to find out if she even had the baby? But the rest of the book was about her husband, in the past, before he met her? And some coke whore he used to sleep with. I would have been depressed if i cared even a little bit about the characters.

A difficult one this. Zadie Smith is an outstanding writer – her essays are astute and penetrative – but whether or not she is an outstanding novelist is debatable. She has made it clear that NW is by far the favourite of her novels and, by implication, the closest to her heart. Yet it is strangely humourless (for a novel billed as a ‘tragicomedy’) and, as a result, not as sympathetic towards the characters as the author would like to project. In addition, it easy to get the impression that she is writing for the literati rather than for the general reader. Contrast the fawning reviews from the literary establishment with the mainly lukewarm to lacerating views on the store (if there are enough reviews the tiny number of trolls will be drowned out by the majority and when averaged out the ratings give a fair idea of popular opinion). I guess that if you are a writer and you feel compelled to experiment to find your true voice you will inevitably alienate different chunks of your readership at each point along the way. Over time you will probably alienate all.
Is NW a real London experience? Well, yes, in a way, though it is a novel more about class than race. In some ways the colour of the protagonists is irrelevant. I appreciate that in a sprawling, multicultural city like London it is difficult to depict the diversity of existences without use of an ensemble cast. Concentration on a few individuals diminishes the city’s complexity and possibilities if the aim is to portray London in all its stupefying intricacy and inequality. NW focuses on four individuals and the point of reference is a typical London housing estate. There is nothing especially original in a story about differential success among assorted individuals in a difficult milieu but the style of writing here is (deliberately) inconsistent and for me this reduces rather than enhances interest in the fate of the principal characters. Furthermore, I believe that if dialogue in London street vernacular is deemed necessary it is best to keep it to a minimum or the speakers will end up sounding like Ali G. I will not go into the story or the characters any more as by now all are well known. Personally I found NW a bit disappointing and a sadly soulless reading experience though I can’t really pinpoint why. It can be placed somewhere in the middle of the pantheon of fiction about London.

Zadie Smith's fourth novel, NW, is her most ambitious in terms of structure and style. She's passionate, poetic, a bit cheeky, and, yes, at times challenging, too. But don't let that scare you off. This novel about the people who inhabit a London neighborhood, told in five sections, might be her best book yet.

The now mid-30s Londoners who all grew up in the same neighborhood, but whose paths have diverged, all have secrets, all have seen successes and failures (some more than others), and all have a complicated relationship with their roots. Essentially, the novel asks us to consider how different factors (race?) and different formative events turn us into the people we eventually become.

The main focus is on Leah Hanwell and Natalie (Keisha) Blake, lifelong friends. Each woman gets her own section of the novel. We start with Leah, whose story is told in short mini-chapters. Leah is in a failing relationship, based largely on physical attraction, with a "beautiful" man named Michel. And she's trying to figure out what it means to be happy -- is the definition of contentment her friend Natalie's marriage to a nice, successful man named Frank, and their two children? Or is it Leah's own avowed-childless state?

The next section, the most straightforward in the novel, tells the story of guy named Felix -- a recovering drug addict who is trying to put his life back together. But is the pull of the past too strong? We only find out at the end of the novel how Felix's story relates to the stories of the other three characters. And it's more than a little bit of a gut-punch.

My favorite part of the novel is Natalie's section, the third. It's the longest in the novel, and it's told in 185 line- to paragraph- to page-length snippets, each with its own title (the title, which, is often key to understanding what Smith is talking about). What makes these so successful is that Smith trusts you as an observant reader, often dropping you in mid-scene or mid-conversation. It's like she assumes you will know what she's talking about -- whether a popular movie or Kurt Cobain or a reference to a previous part of the novel itself -- and therefore the effect is that you actually feel engaged in Natalie's story. Besides that, Natalie's story -- growing up, going to law school, marrying Frank, harboring a secret -- is really engrossing.

The final two (very short) sections tie a bow on the novel, as we see Leah's problems with her boyfriend come to a head, and Natalie, despite her own problems, has to come help her. We also see Natalie taking a quasi-tour of the neighborhood with the fourth principle of the novel, a fella named Nathan, who had been the object of a schoolgirl crush by Leah. But now, drug-addicted and possibly homeless (we actually first see Nathan briefly in the first section, when Leah runs into him at a train station), Nathan stands as cautionary tale and is the balance or contrast to the relatively successful Leah and Natalie.

Overall, this is a great novel. I loved it! My only complaint about the novel is that, even though it's 400 pages, it actually feels a bit slight. Indeed, it's probably, on a word-count basis, the shortest 400-page novel you'll ever read. That's because the line-by-line spacing is rather loose and the Natalie section often breaks several times on the page.

I would've gladly kept reading more about these fascinating characters. There are several unanswered questions at the end. But still, the process of getting there is a really rewarding reading experience. I devoured this novel in about four days. It's worth nothing that, often, you have to go back and re-read some of the simple clues Smith drops in earlier sections to understand a reference in a latter. But that's not hard, and it gives you those awesome "I'm-in-on-the-inside-joke. I get it!" moments when you understand. (Example: Why does Natalie change her name from Keisha?)

Zadie Smith is one of my all-time favorite writers, and this novel -- seven long years after her last -- does nothing to diminish that. Four stars. Highly recommended for the literary fiction fiend.

“NW” covers a lot of social ground. While rooted in London housing projects, Natalie Blake succeeds in becoming a yuppie, but one with little sympathy for those left behind, feeling that hard work is all that is needed. Leah, her close friend from the age of 4, is solidly middle class, enjoyed her childhood and finds her objective in life is to stay perpetually 18 – yet the people who do not make it weigh heavily on her. If Leah were in a group painting, she would be one of those figures not distinctly drawn. There is an account of a day in the life of Felix, a one time addict turning his life around. This was my favorite part of the book, can stand on its own, and indeed is only very loosely connected to the rest of the book by a plot contrivance. There are many secondary characters, mostly well drawn. Nathan is not, he is rather ghostly, and it is not entirely clear he is connected to Felix: Felix encounters two men on a train, and while the novel may be suggesting that Nathan is one of them, it is hard to match the older one, so mean spirited, to Nathan the “survivor” on the streets who Leah and her mother encounter early in the book selling train passes (great thread on this in Goodreads).

Many different prose styles are employed. In dialogue, it can sometimes be a puzzle which must be worked out as to who is speaking. Sometimes this is fun, sometimes it is frustrating. The night Natalie flees her house may warrant some special prose techniques, but I do not believe Smith rises to the occasion. Smith does well in depicting a marriage which superficially seems a perfect match, but was entered into by two people who knew much too little of each other.

Ultimately, this is an unsatisfying novel. I recently read “Swing Time” and preferred it.

I am trying to figure out why, despite its acclaim, I really did not enjoy this book. As a matter of a fact, it was one of those long books where I kept looking to see just...how...much...was....left... to finish it -- having determined that I had read too much to just abandon it. And, as I said, it was supposed to be so good. Hmmm, well, it never caught on with me. I tried to think, do I not like it because it takes place in London (a city I have only visited once) and so I can't relate? But, then, I am reading another book that takes place in a dystopian society that I have never visited (especially since it is fictional!) and I felt more connected. Was the book too long to hold my attention? Well, yes -- but only because it was this book and not just the length. The aforementioned second book that I am also reading is also really long yet I keep wanting to return to it to find out what happens. Is the confusing shift between characters (I still can't figure out if one has an alter ego or is a completely different person!?) No, it's not that. The other book shifts between characters and even between time periods and inhabiting other characters lives, yet, it is still more comprehensible, not to mention enjoyable. I like a couple of parts towards the end that related to gentrifying and trying to improve the lives in the NW neighborhood of the title. the first was a metaphor of newly planted saplings which, within a short period of time, were either ripped up by the roots or broken in half. I found this a haunting image. The second was the commentary of a former promising classmate who is now homeless. He talks about how everyone loved him and invited him in when he was younger. But, as a black male, he was shut out and treated poorly once he passed the age of ten. I found this another sobering image. In all, I tried to like this book. I had to work hard for it to hold my focus and interest but, in the end, all the way to the end that I finally reached, it just did not.

In Praise of Tough Reads

I read Zadie Smith's "NW" immediately after finishing Jonas Jonasson's "The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed out of the Window and Disappeared." The juxtaposition taught me something about my reading proclivities: I prefer books and authors that make me work.

Zadie Smith made me work. It was sometimes difficult to sort out the connection amongst the constellation of characters in "NW." Standard formatting devices such as quotation marks around speech were often eschewed blurring the line between what was spoken out loud and what was internal monologue. The four parts of the novel were each structured differently: the first, "visitation," had a typical format of numbered chapters; the second, "guest," used borough designations to set off the chapters; the third and longest part, "host," numbered not the chapters but each individual paragraph; and finally the fourth, reprised the title "visitation" and was essentially one relatively short chapter. But more challenging than these structural variations were the difficulties that I experienced in following the characters' evolutions with the at-times convoluted plot. I had to be constantly attentive. I needed to reread sections or flip back to previous chapters. I did a great deal of highlighting of passages that I thought would help me follow the storyline.

And, bottom line, I was totally engaged. "NW" was not a fun, easy read. It was, by contrast, difficult. And I loved it. Like a great workout at the gym, Zadie Smith had the adrenalin pumping through my brain. And that left me satisfied in the same way that a rush of endorphins does.

As for "The 100-Year-Old Man...," it's probably sacrilege to say that I was bored. I know that the book has been immensely popular, as are others by Jonasson. And, truth be told, I wasn't exactly bored. It was a fun story told by Jonasson with such an entertaining narrative style that the book carried me along effortlessly. Which is not to say that Jonasson's writing is effortless. As a struggling fiction writer myself, I know how hard it is to write a text that has the fluidity of Jonasson's work. But as for visceral satisfaction? For me, "The 100-Year-Old Man..." doesn't come close to "NW."

Zadie Smith’s 2012 novel, NW, makes for an unusual reading experience, one that is sometimes as frustrating as it is gratifying. The “NW” of her title refers to northwest London, a section of the city Smith is intimately familiar with as a result of having grown up there herself. The good news is that this familiarity allows Smith to create a core group of memorable characters for NW, some of whom have known each other well for a lifetime, and others who know each other only to the degree that they recognize everyone in the neighborhood from having seen the same old faces on the streets day after day. The bad news is that Smith decided to use a different writing style for each section of the novel. That makes it difficult for the reader ever to settle into a comfortable enough reading rhythm for the story to take over and flow on its own. Getting the most from NW begins as a chore – and it ends that way – making it likely that some readers will abandon the book long before they make it through its first section.

The book revolves around the relationship between its two main characters, Leah Hanwell, a white woman of Irish descent, and Keisha Blake, a black woman. The two have been best friends since they were little girls, and they slip into and out of that relationship with ease throughout the entire book. Leah is married to a striking Algerian francophone with such good looks that her black co-workers are starting to resent the fact that a white woman, and not one of them, is married to him. Keisha, in the meantime, has re-invented herself as Natalie Blake, a successful London barrister, and irritatingly to Leah, a mother.

The other two main characters of NW are not well known to Leah or Natalie. Nathan, now hopelessly addicted to drugs and living on the streets, is the boy both women were in love with as girls but never worked up the nerve to speak to at school. Felix is just a face on the streets they have seen enough that they feel as if they know him. Of the two, Felix is much the more sympathetic character and the section of the novel devoted primarily to him is perhaps the best part of NW.

NW is a realistic novel. It is sometimes optimistic, sometimes angry, as it offers its rather bleak look at urban life. It is a novel long on ethnic influences and expectations and intimately explores the fine line between remaining true to one’s roots and being limited by them. It is not a novel I will soon forget, but it is one in which the author’s experimentation with various style types hurt as much as it helped. NW is, I think, one of those novels destined to have a whole lot of readers give up on it long before they should. And that is a shame, because its characters and plot deserve more.

I have read Zadie Smith, and I loved White Teeth-- Based on the NYT and some of the comments here I decided to buy the book.

I didn't like it-- why?
.
1) i know the "new" form for her is this disjointed writing but while i "got" it-- i didn't enjoy reading it-- it was hard to get through those parts and it was just so ANNOYING.

2) the characters were really thin. I just didn't feel ANYTHING for them. I was just disconnected --none of them had any redeeming qualities, i didn't like any of them, and couldn't relate to them- part of reading is for me to identify with the characters no matter how different or similar -- and she really lost me on this.

3) i don't really get what this is about ( i get what ms. smith was maybe alluding to) but it didn't come across. Of course maybe i didn't get it-- either way, that's a failure on the part of the author (in my view as a reader).

This could have been a really great book, Ms. Smith's style of writing when you can understand what's going on is beautiful and her prose and knack for observations have charmed and touched me-- but (and here it is) style, prose, and observations mean nothing when i'm committing to a novel that i hope will take me away, and bring me back with something more than I had when I started it.-- I spent most of the time hoping it would get better, excited when i thought it was going in that direction, and then ultimately disappointed that I wasted my time on this and money.

Don't buy it. I wish I didn't. Sorry if this is harsh (and it pains me to say this with authors i like )

this is not a book i recommend-- and i'm sorry about that. I look forward to her next book.

This is a wonderful novel with a multi-layered structure and fascinating characters. Despite its up-to-the-minute references, it is most like Hardy or late Dickens in its social comedies and individual tragedies. I loved "White Teeth" and this is even better. I can't pretend to understand what motivates either Natalie or Leah; they start from a place familiar to women and end up profoundly lonely for reasons that aren't determined by their history. But that makes it interesting: people in real life are mysterious and unpredictable, and you have to take them at face value. Overall, the structure is like a complex piece of music: you have to listen to the individual voices and their harmonies and discords.

I nearly called it quits on this after section one, but I am so glad I didn't—and what came after that point is what boosted this up to a four from a three for me. The first section, I just...didn't get. I understood what was going on, don't get me wrong, but the writing style wasn't for me. But Felix's section is where I fell in love with the prose and the dialogue, and this lasted right through to nearly the end (the very last section, again, not so much). Having not read any of Zadie Smith's works before, I had no idea when I began whether this was just her style and perhaps why people loved her work so much. Having read the following sections, though, I'm not sure that that's the case; but I will say that I am now much more inclined to source another one of her books because of good old Felix.

This is probably the most cinematic book I've ever read. As in cutting-edge cinema. Experimental cinema. French new wave and Bergman and Fellini and much more.

With lots of jittery hand-held camera work and with loads and loads of jump cuts (move over Godard). God, I love jump cuts. Cutting without changing the camera angle, which gives the feeling of the passage of time. You feel that in life quite a bit, do you notice that? Sometimes, sometimes not?

The jump cutting also conveys the dissonant, internal and emotional mental states of the characters in the book. Zadie Smith evidently wants her audience to experience a jagged, nervous feeling toward her characters. An unsettled and neurotic feeling.

This book also has a stream of conciousness that would make Joyce cross-eyed. It's a scattered, semi-confused, semi-inarticulate stream of conciousness. The type that takes place inside our minds and in our conversations so much of the time; and not the quaint, articulate, smooth stream of conciousness that we're so used to experiencing in certain types of books and films and in other types of art forms.

The book can be hard to follow, as is the case with Godard and Bergman films. They call this cutting edge and experimental, but ironically it comes a lot closer to our own day-to-day reality: It can be hard to follow.

At any rate, you want cutting edge? With this book, you got it.

The residents of Northwest London that Zadie Smith introduces us to in NW are facing their share of life challenges. They are working class people. A few are addicts. One escapes.

Leah and Keisha are childhood best friends who are of different races but the same class. As they grow older, Leah is quite ambition less but Keisha remains focused and determined to escape the boundaries the lower middle class. While climbing the ladder to a better life, Keisha decides to change her name to Natalie. Natalie's new status in life afforded her to marry well and start a new life away from the lower rungs of the class ladder that descended into Northwest London. When Natalie discovers a new hobby she suddenly finds herself lower than she ever was before.

Leah remains in NorthWest London. She also marries and her husband is eager to start a family. Leah goes to great lengths to make sure this never happens. Her secrets torment her.

Felix is a recovering drug addict whose mother abandoned him and his siblings leaving them with their Rastafarian father. Felix is optimistic about starting over. He is walking away from old habits and an old love. What he walks into is far worse than what he is walking away from.

I see a lot of reviewers complaining about the structure of NW but it is what I loved the most. In my opinion, this style actually confirms that Zadie Smith is the master of dialogue. I can't give her enough praise in that area. Granted, there were times I got good and lost in the narrative but I recovered pretty quickly. You get use to it after a while. Overall, the characters were flat. They were well developed but flat. There was one character that was incredibly captivating, Annie, Felix's ex-girlfriend. Annie's appearance was the highlight of the book for me. She was so tragically beautiful.