13/01/2025
Joseph Quash

‘Frank De Angelis asked his wife, Natalie Blake, where she was going. [...] “Nowhere”, said Natalie Blake.’

- Zadie Smith, N-W, 2012

According to James Arnett, the contradiction at the heart of Zadie Smith’s NW is “the tension between the ability to intellectually perceive one's subjugation to capitalism and the affective experience of nevertheless feeling like a free subject under the aegis of neoliberalism's identity-empowering ideologies.” This suffocating paradox faced by the twenty-first century working class will provide the scaffolding for this essay. I will argue that, given the pervasiveness of the neoliberal myth, even if postcolonial Londoners manage to get anywhere in terms of their socio-economic status and thereby their geography, it persists that they remain static with regard to their psychological situation, or occasionally vice versa. Considering the inescapability of the free market at either a material or a cerebral level, as outlined in Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, “it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to capitalism.” This is a claim which, in tandem with Arnett and the aesthetic and thematic components of NW, I will argue to be the most profound “dilemma of contemporary subjectivity”, and one which prevents postcolonial Londoners from meaningfully getting anywhere.

The significance of the title and its allusions are crucial in the framing of the novel. Northwest London provides a vibrant, hectic canvas upon which the events of the narrative messily unfold; the discussion of whether postcolonial Londoners get anywhere materially or geographically must begin here. “Rather than linked through sequence or plot line,” posits Tammy Amiel Houser, “the novel is held together by placement.” This is certainly supported by both the fragmented narrative style Smith employs, with each section distinct in its voice and structure, and the non-chronological plot thread. Crucially, however, the environmental focal point never strays too far from NW, or for too long, precisely because the characters themselves cannot. Early in the accounts of the first two characters introduced, Leah and Felix, Smith reveals they were both born in the same fictional estate of Caldwell, and simultaneously reveals that neither has managed to create much distance between it and their present living situations. “– I was born just there. / From there to here, a journey longer than it looks” Leah says, then thinks (Smith’s elimination of quotation marks in Leah’s chapter often blurs the distinction between these modes), “trac[ing]... [t]wo floors up, one window across” in a minor motion that spotlights its proximity. In Felix’s ensuing chapter, the information has to be squeezed out in an awkward interaction:

Together they looked up at the towers of Caldwell, not five hundred yards away… ‘And you living back here now?’ ‘My girl lives just there.’ He indicated the supermarket sign with his chin. ‘Felix, man, you properly local. I remember when you was working in there. ‘Member when I saw you on the tills that time I was like–’ ‘Yeah, well I ain’t there no more.’

Smith confronts the reader with this detail hastily in order to cement Caldwell’s part of the local urban topography, an inescapable part of both the district’s physical skyline and the characters’ psychological horizons. Leah implies that her spatial journey is not representative of the difficulties of its metaphorical counterpart, stressing the adverbs of location and their distinctiveness, resulting in a rhythm almost mimetic in its emphasis. Felix, meanwhile, decisively cuts off his acquaintance, rejecting the assertion of his locality, and refusing even to indulge the recounting of a narrative that unearths a time of his life that he has psychically shed. Both characters clearly demarcate their present situation as other to that of the past, but it remains that neither Felix nor Leah have managed to move far from the dominating silhouette of their place of birth, a looming tangible reminder of their humble origins.

Almost as immediate and overshadowing as Caldwell in Leah’s mind is her university debt. The British education system is a central point of contention in NW, with the dynamic of Keisha/Natalie being lauded as the model story of success, and Leah epitomising one who fell through its gaps and failed to recover – or perhaps was failed in her lack of recovery. Fisher outlines that the conversion of tertiary education into a profit-making enterprise in tandem with the onslaught of mobile technology and the attention economy has meant that students are falling prey to a state of “depressive hedonia… constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.” This diagnosis applies to Keisha/Natalie’s depiction of Leah during their university years, as seen in this vignette: “She had been holding [the fridge] open a long time. She seemed to have forgotten why… Keisha scooped some hummus up in a pitta bread and looked into her friend’s dilated pupils.” Her recreational drug use is congruous with her experimental streak, but could yet speak to a deeper disaffection. It is important to note, also, that Keisha/Natalie has a necessarily incomplete purview, her analyses being externally imposed and with significant temporal leaps between them (“Keisha’s first visit”, “Leah’s third visit”). However, from Leah’s own perspective, Smith reveals that she retrospectively laments her university years. “What was the point of it all? Three years of useless study. Out of pocket, out of her depth… An unpaid, growing debt.” She substantializes and dwells on it as she works the job she is greatly overqualified for. Fisher encapsulates her situation thus: “Pay for your own exploitation, the [neoliberal] logic insists – get into debt so you can get the same McJob you could have walked into if you’d left school at sixteen.” Leah must now grapple with her abstract but perpetually looming student debt materially and psychologically, just as she must grapple with the implacable Caldwell tower. Around the estate, organic manifestations of its stifling atmosphere exist. “The ivy from the estate invades the [wall’s] gaps and smothers anything Michel tries to grow”. This incursion of the estate into her supposedly separate space, which, crucially, is the garden, the arena most conducive to thought for Leah, is a glaring metaphor for its ongoing psychical asphyxiation.

Leah’s odds of success were slim, having attended the notorious Brayton school. Significantly, both Brayton and Caldwell are presented as labels almost impossible to shake, with Shar thrice reminding Leah “You went Brayton”. Leah sarcastically outlines Keisha/Natalie’s meteoric rise through the lens of this formative institution, implying how significant she considers it to be. The latter is “Nat, the girl done good from the thousand-kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from.” Keisha/Natalie ostensibly represents the pinnacle of achievement in the improvement of her material living conditions. She has geographically escaped the estate and improved her economic status, leading to her internalisation of others' perceptions of her as proof of the functioning meritocratic system. However, it is precisely this exceptionality, her medal as the sole “girl done good”, that undermines the myth, which falsely claims, in Oliver James’ words, that “access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background”. Leah and Keisha/Natalie’s respective proximities to Caldwell, the epicentre of prospectlessness, map their antithetical socio-economic journeys: “Leah passes the old estate every day on the walk to the corner shop. She can see it from her backyard. Nat lives just far enough to avoid it.” However, Leah’s implication that Keisha/Natalie has forgotten her working class roots is disproven upon reading the latter’s narrative; in fact, her inability to do so is the defining characteristic in her identity crisis, as explored later.

Keisha/Natalie’s aforementioned internalisation of the neoliberal fallacy is insinuated to be embedded to the point of permanence. During her climactic conversation with Nathan Bogle in the haze of their dream-like walk, he undermines the shaky foundations of her worldview. “Be responsible for yourself! You’re free! / Nah, man, that’s where you’re wrong. I ain’t free. Ain’t never been free. / We’re all free! / But I don’t live like you though. / What?” This dialogue can instead be read as an internal monologue, by the same logic the entire section can be: Keisha/Natalie and Nathan are foils of each other, down to their initials, and Smith does away with any quotation markers, blurring the origin of their voices. An illusory vignette clouds the narrative, and Nathan takes on a distinctly hallucinatory aspect, refusing to stop shadowing her, and saying: “...I ain’t in your dream, Keisha, you’re in mine.” A contradictory polyglotism is central to Keisha/Natalie’s characterisation, and nowhere expressed better than in this exchange which, if read as monologue, highlights the incompatibility of two parts of her self. The hysterical repetition of exclamation marks reads as self-assurance, and Nathan/Natalie’s incisive riposte is met with a subdued query. Despite this interrogation of convictions, we ultimately see that Keisha/Natalie’s outlook has not changed. During the thematic denouement, Leah articulates the feeling, as Ruth Franklin describes, of “typical white middle-class… liberal guilt”: “‘I just don’t understand why I have this life… Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road.’” Keisha/Natalie repeats her earlier simple interrogative pronoun, having “expected a more difficult question. / ‘Because we worked harder”. Her regurgitation of the meritocratic narrative as a justification for inequity of living standards reads as hollow, and manifestly incorrect. As Franklin points out, “[Felix’s stabbing] is entirely random. It has nothing to do with the man as a person or the life choices that he made”. In fact, it both represents a sharp manifestation of the neoliberal snare that circumscribes his existence, his inability to escape that physical space, and occurs as a product of the oppressive socio-economic environment he was born into, where young men turn to crime to survive. In her question, Leah makes an attempt to reach beyond this pervasive, oppressive metanarrative, and has been trying to the point of borderline psychological collapse, but Keisha/Natalie refuses to engage her on these terms. 

Northwest London, then, provides the backdrop upon which the material journeys of the protagonists take place. It also, however, exists as a force that actively harms their prospects, and stunts their progress; “[n]owhere”, Molly Slavin proposes, “...might be interpreted as NW” just as easily as Northwest. As this essay’s titular quotation suggests, Keisha/Natalie at the close, despite all material evidence to the contrary, ends up going “‘[n]owhere.’” Whether the animate tentacles of Caldwell, or the violence that springs from it due to economic and civic neglect, Smith uses the fictional estate as a canvas upon which to explore the effects of the cementation of the meritocratic myth in socio-cultural discourse and governmental policy. Only the exceptional, or perhaps the lucky, are able to escape spatially, and, Smith implies, at no small cost.

Let us explore in more depth the precarity and contradictory nature of Keisha/Natalie’s beliefs, so as to illuminate the psychological stagnation that she undergoes despite her material achievements. As Arnett reveals, her professional success has adverse effects on her mental wellbeing.

…now that she finds herself at the top of her profession, she cannot resist the pangs of self-knowledge and the claustrophobic sense that not only was she not meant to escape the lower-class immobility… but that… she would never be at ease in a class that doesn’t recognize her.

The recurrent motif that crops up throughout the narrative, and Smith’s primary object of interrogation, claims that “I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.” Although initially encountered by Leah, it is Keisha/Natalie for whom it becomes the defining epigraph. This becomes a phrase which, despite being naïve in its wishful ignorance, Keisha/Natalie holds to be true, albeit increasingly desperately. It tries to wholly place the impetus of progress on the individual with no recognition of the role environment plays in the action of defining; it exposes the neoliberal illusion of self-determination. There are, in fact, an enmeshment of social, cultural and economic factors that have defined each character since their birth. Throughout her account, Keisha/Natalie is plagued by a lack of identity, represented by the fragmented episodes it is made up of. Franklin posits that the reader is “piecing together the story of Keisha’s life, not at all unlike the way she perceives herself to be piecing together her own identity”. During her time at university, the kiln of experimentation and self-discovery, her “having no self to be, not with Leah, not with anyone” becomes suddenly glaring. Smith refers to her here as “Ms Blake” censoring even her given name, reducing her to no more than the product of her parents. Her name, of course, has been a key site in her “crazy” drive for “self-invention” – the abandonment of Keisha in favour of the ethnically neutral Natalie is a primer for her beckoning future. She is, however, unable to shake off her impostor syndrome and feelings of inadequacy, and remains conscious of the falsity and inauthenticity of attempts to do so. Zadie Smith, through Keisha/Natalie, is trying to capture a pervasive contemporary phenomenon in which “people feel quite discontinuous with themselves, or feel out of context, or feel they have to invent their lives day by day.” Keisha/Natalie feels this quotidian pressure to self-invent acutely:

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag… when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps least inauthentic.

The use of the double negative in the final caveat is an admission that she has no core identity from which to build – across all these metrics of familial role, class status and ethnicity, she is caught in limbo. This absence of anchorage contributes to her psychic entrapment. She cannot aim for integrity, so instead tries merely to avoid spuriousness.

Contrastingly, Felix is a figure who comes close to psychological escape. “How did he ever come to know this place? Unknowing it would just be restoring things to their natural, healthy state” he thinks upon visiting Annie, his sometime lover and drug partner, with the intention of breaking things off. This train of thought reveals his disgust at a previous self, a lifestyle of addiction he can now reject as unnatural and unhealthy. He employs the metaphor of a video game in which he has to slay demons to progress in order to explain this to Annie, who responds

‘Yes, yes, I’ve grasped the metaphor… Life’s not a video game, Felix – there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is everyone dies at the end. Game over.’

Despite claiming to understand it, Annie’s pessimistic view fails to understand the nuance of Felix’s metaphor. He isn’t trying to accumulate points at positive integers but rather slay his abstract, psychological demons; the next level represents the next phase of his life. Annie does, however, diagnose the wider context in which Felix plays this game. Irrespective of the profundity of his mental transformation, his material environment remains the same. Her Chekhovian principle that “everyone dies at the end” is satisfied swiftly as Felix is fatally stabbed over a minor altercation in the following chapter. It can be seen, though, that in regard to Felix’s psychology, he has got somewhere – as he leaves Annie’s building behind, and by extension his old life, “he felt like a man undergoing some not-yet-invented process called particle transfer, wonderfully, blissfully light.” The fantastical language of metamorphosis implies his transcendent sense of progress, one which is prematurely hamstrung by his imminent and lonely death.

Smith weaves a complex portrait of Northwest London, and of the material and psychological journeys its inhabitants undertake, in which these two facets are inextricably linked but progress can never be simultaneously achieved. Felix and Keisha/Natalie’s arcs can be seen as the two sides of the neoliberal coin – whilst she makes huge strides in her socio-economic conditions, her psychology wallows in self-doubt; he, on the other hand, having broken the physiological grasp of his substance addiction, and cut the psychological chains of his attachment to Caldwell, becomes an entirely avoidable victim of his geographical placement, and the poverty-crime matrix that is perpetuated there. In the aftermath of this, the macro-tragedy becomes apparent: the conditions established by late-stage capitalism preclude total escape. Despite minor variations, losses and victories in the characters’ material and the cerebral domains, from within the confines of neoliberal capitalism, postcolonial Londoners can go nowhere.

© Joseph Quash 2025