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Literary culture arranged a peculiar fate for Zadie Smith. She became a major novelist before she had written a good novel. Major, that is, by acclaim: sponsorship, awards, sales, gushing reviews. But the novels thus garlanded only partly justified their prominence. White Teeth (2000), written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, is flippant rather than comic; it is full of painfully unpersuasive characters and scenes for instance the halal butcher who kills six pigeons with a single swipe from a meat-cleaver. The Autograph Man (2002) is marked by a profound rhetorical instability; On Beauty (2005), the best of Smith’s first four novels, struck a purer note, and hinted that her true metier is English comic prose of an older vintage, but it was also fatally cutesy (it retold EM Forster’s Howards End with an audible wry smile), and it articulated a sentimental liberalism that refused to put its characters through real hell. NW (2012) was the fruit of Smith’s belated

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