"How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into a literary superstar and poster girl for multiculturalism at 24? With a novel about a pot-smoking ChineseJewish autograph hunter, the dangers of fame and the shallowness of pop culture, of course."
"The Autograph Man begins in full wisecracking throttle with three boys in the back of a car on their way to watch a wrestling match between Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks at the Royal Festival Hall. As 12-year-old Alex-Li Tandem gets Big Daddy's autograph (the start of an obsession), his own daddy drops dead from a brain tumour."
"The critical heavyweights of the time didn't pull their punches: A poky, pallid successor (Michiko Kakutani, who had rapturously reviewed White Teeth, in the New York Times), cartoonish and full of misplaced ironies and grinning complicities (James Wood in the LRB). Others were more generous. Whatever. Smith was just getting stuff out the way."
White Teeth became a massive early success, selling for a six-figure sum while Zadie Smith was at university and making her a literary superstar and multicultural poster figure at 24. The Autograph Man centers on a pot-smoking Chinese-Jewish autograph hunter, begins with a vivid prologue about a wrestling autograph and a father's sudden death, but the remainder drew mixed reviews and many critics found it weaker. The Wife of Willesden (2021) adapts the Wife of Bath into Alvita, a brash Jamaican-British five-times‑married woman, and played at Kilburn's Kiln before transferring to the National and New York. The Fraud (2023) marks a first foray into historical fiction.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]