I’ve always felt a tad sorry for those artists, musicians, writers and film directors who produce a genuine classic very early in their careers and then have to spend the rest of their lives living in its shadow. Bob Dylan comes to mind with his Blonde on Blonde and his Blood on the Tracks, as does Stanley Kubrick with his 2001 and his Clockwork Orange. Zadie Smith is in danger of falling into this category, living as she does with her monumental White Teeth written, by my calculations, when she was just twenty five. These things are subjective of course, but there is a sufficient consensus to suggest that White Teeth was a towering achievement and that it would be a damn hard act to follow.

I enjoyed The Autograph Man and On Beauty well enough but classics they were not. So it was with a mixture of keen anticipation and tetchy apprehension that I set out to read Smith’s latest offering.

Before I get going I should declare a personal interest. I’ve done time in North West London and most of its constituent parts are at least familiar if not well known to me. I taught for a while in the old Willesden High School before it became a shiny new, all singing, all dancing Academy, and I helped build London Progress, Britain’s foremost ping pong club which was situated right on the border of Willesden and Harlesden. There was hardly a road in the area that could not boast a Progress member either past or present. You can’t get much more NW than that. In fact if my arithmetic serves me correctly, I could very easily have taught a Miss Z Smith or one of her contemporaries, although I have no idea which school she actually attended. The fact of the matter is, although I have drifted to the far west of the capital, the North West is still firmly in my DNA. Oh, and I forgot to add, I was born in Cricklewood which is pretty close to the epicentre of Smith’s novel.

Enough of the personal ramblings, onto the novel itself. It’s got all the usual ingredients you’d expect from a Zadie Smith novel. Penetrating insights into the human condition, bleak existential humour, and a smooth and effortless flow between the particular and the universal. The central theme, which might be usefully described as the lottery of life, is contemporary enough. An interesting polemic develops between the main protagonists as to whether hard work or sheer luck of the draw is responsible for one’s future life. As for the intertwining plots and sub-plots, they are all sufficiently well worked and authentically presented to be believable. Yet something is missing. Somewhere towards the end of the novel I got the distinct impression that I didn’t really care about the main protagonists. I wanted to, I really did. Smith was writing about people I know and people like me. Yet they seemed distant, remote, somehow not quite real. Was that down to some failing in my own perception or was there a missing ingredient? I’m not sure.

Smith divides the novel into five sections and in the third section entitled Host she employs a very modernist style of story-telling, adopting a cross between a stream of consciousness and a diary format. Perhaps even an acknowledgement of the texting, social-networking generation. It was during this section that I felt myself drifting away. I even found myself skim-reading to relieve the boredom. That was something I did not expect from a Zadie Smith novel. Maybe Smith was deliberately trying to create a sense of distance from her characters to reflect their alienation. If so it worked, but to the detriment of a satisfying read. Is it always necessary to care about the characters in a book or a film? I am old fashioned enough to think so, but that probably says more about my own limited perspectives on literature than anything else.

What I can say is that whereas I felt an intense connection to the central characters of White Teeth, one that stayed with me for weeks and months after completing the book, with NW all I wanted to do was finish the story, complete the review and consign the thing to the bookcase. As for Leah and Natalie, I really wasn’t that bothered. Their little sexual infatuations and existential dramas seemed strangely unimportant to me. And that annoyed me because I wanted to be concerned, I wanted to care.

I feel like I should apologise to Zadie Smith for bashing out such a negative review. Who am I to pour cold water over such a brilliant novelist. And there is no doubt that there are some haunting passages in the book. Nowhere is the human existential angst and crippling alienation more devastatingly portrayed than in these few metaphysical lines presented early on in the tale. It is with these lines that I shall end, in the hope that the negative is at least partly counterbalanced by the stunningly positive. Smith writes:

How have you lived your whole life in those streets and never known me? How long did you think you could avoid me? What made you think you were exempt? Don’t you know that I have been here as long as people cried out for help? Here me: I am not like those mealy-mouthed pale Madonnas, those simpering virgins! I am older than this place! Older even than the faith that takes my name in vain! Spirit of these beech woods and phone boxes, hedgerows and lamp posts, freshwater springs and tube stations, ancient yews and one stop shops, grazing land and 3D multiplexes. Unruly England of the real life, the animal life! Of the old church, of the new, of a time before churches. Are you feeling hot? Is it all too much? Did you hope for something else? Were you misinformed? Was there more to it than that. Or less? If we give it a different name will the weightless sensation disappear? Are your knees going? Who are you? Would you like a glass of water? Is the sky falling? Could things have been differently arranged, in a different order, in a different place? P64

Here is Smith at her very best and what a joy it is. I intend to re-read White Teeth in the very near future just to reconfirm in my own mind just what Smith is capable of when she is at the very top of her game. And the answer, of course, is sheer literary brilliance!