Greetings, writers—
Well, I skipped back-to-school night to see Zadie Smith at Portland Arts & Lectures last night, and boy am I not sorry, even though my 13-year-old is a skilled and gleeful guilt-tripper. Smith was in conversation with New Yorker staff writer Parul Seghal about her latest novel, The Fraud, which centers on a celebrated 19th-century criminal trial.
The main players (all real people): Scottish widow Eliza Touchet, housekeeper to the prolific but untalented novelist William Ainsworth (friend and rival of Charles Dickens); Arthur Orton, an East Ender claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-lost heir to the Tichborne fortune; Andrew Bogle, a man formerly enslaved in Jamaica who testifies at Orton’s London trial, one of the longest in English history; and Henry Bogle, the biracial son of Andrew and his wife.
Smith wrote the book “on a subscription model,” emailing chapters to two close friends each week (very Dickensian), in a process she called “wonderful.” Can you imagine! The Fraud is, she told us, “a deconstructed Victorian novel,” designed to be be something of “a confection”—at least in the beginning. I’m paraphrasing now, but she said something along the lines of “It’s all in good humor—until suddenly it isn’t.” The “isn’t” comes particularly in the middle section, which recounts Bogle’s African ancestry and enslaved life.
I could go on and on about all the brilliant things Zadie Smith said last night—about forward-thinking Victorians, about solidarity vs. allyship, about 18th-century sex lives, about the “moral luck” of being born in 1975 London, and about the difference between writing fiction and criticism—but this is a prompt day and I’ve got a bunch of editing to do, so I’ll wrap it up real quick.
“I wrote the last chapter of the book first,” Smith said last night. “That was a little mini-challenge for myself.”
Today, write the end of something: a poem, a scene, or even your whole novel. Find out what it has to tell you about what might come before it. (By the way, I am totally doing this prompt myself.)
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Check out Parul Seghal’s lovely close read of Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art here and listen to Smith’s interview with Terry Gross here.
I wish I had gone, I was going to but got lazy or disheartened to drive the hour and half to Portland. Glad it she gave a great talk!