Twenty-five years on from her dazzling debut, and as a new collection of essays comes out, we assess the British author’s best books
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 Chinese‑Jewish 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. Unfortunately, the rest of the novel doesn’t quite live up to the prologue. 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.
