The Fraud is an ambitious book, not one to take lightly. It encompasses the true story of an identity fraud trial in the 1800s, where a man returning from the colonies supposes to be not an East End butcher, but the lost son of a wealthy family. The family say he isn’t. Others, including a loyal black servant and the masses, believe he is.
Great story, but it never really gets the telling it deserves. Smith, instead, gives the narration to a spiky Scottish cousin of a once-famous English novelist, William Ainsworth. She is Eliza Touchet, the housekeeper for William and also his cousin, with some cousinly romping in their past. Why he overlooks her to marry his ignorant maid servant, Sarah is not explained, other than the fact that she is pregnant, and when have English gents ever done the right thing? Eliza is always his genteel companion, the intelligent hostess to Dickens, Forster and Thackeray etc at Ainsworth’s literary parties. She helps Ainsworth with his writing – not enough, unfortunately. The success of his early, verbose novels (which indeed at one point out-sell Dickens) lead to flamboyant fantasies and he is ridiculed by his peers.
This is a feminist story as much as anything.
Wonder had reduced Mrs Touchet to a nunlike silence. All her life she had been trying to open a locked door. She had pushed as hard as she could upon it – using means both personal and metaphysical – in the belief that the door opened outwards, onto ultimate reality, and that this was a sight few people are ever granted in this lifetime – particularly if they happen to be born female.
She discovers the inward opening of the door. She gains aspirations to be a writer herself, and the fraud case becomes her material. She attends months of the trial with the outspoken Sarah, who is a foil to her measured thinking. “What you call foolishness, Mrs Touchet, I call eternal optimism. I always hope for the best and the jolly thing is I am almost always rewarded.” I wonder about this statement. Is it profound, or just the cliché of a happy fool? Mrs Touchet observes and takes notes, reports back to Ainsworth sometimes, but it is never really clear if she believes the fraudster or not. She certainly believes the ex-slave, Andrew Bogle, who has an honest face, apparently. She befriends him, learns his stories, the bitter stories of the plantation from where the wealth in question originates. The fraudster seemed to believe his own stories enough to convince the masses. “Mrs Touchet drew yet another theory of truth from these melancholy reflections: people lie to themselves. People lie to themselves all the time.“
I admit to being a bit frustrated by the framing of the book. A lot of the time it feels like we are following the wrong story, but this is Zadie Smith’s book and she is telling the story her own way, with big themes in the background being overshadowed by other concerns and elephants in every room. This is how Smith sees it, perhaps. I think the book is about the effects of slavery but our narrator, an incisive woman, is looking the other way. That part is someone else’s story. It’s not in her living room.
I’ll need to come back to The Fraud after giving it some stewing time. It’s a book that calls out to be studied. It would be excellent for intellectual book clubs, but its also a story that deserves to be re-read patiently. A book to grow into.
Cristina Sanders' blog 