After frenzy, a too clever tale of celebrity

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Stewart, Rhonda

books

The Autograph Man

By Zadie Smith (Random House, $24.95)

In the opening pages of Zadie Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man, as 12-year-old Alex-Li Tandem rides in a car with his father he watches a plane flying overhead and wonders what he looks like from 10,000 feet.

Readers are initially eager to go along for the ride and find out, but curiosity soon gives way to disappointment.

Smith exploded on the scene two years ago with a lavishly praised debut called White Teeth, a sprawling tale of race and friendship told through two North London families. Considering the breathless raves for the book, it was almost inevitable that the follow-up would buckle under the weight of hype and expectation.

From the first glimpse of Alex in the car, we learn that he "deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves." He grows up to become the autograph man of the book's title, a trader who prides himself on distinguishing genuine celebrity signatures from fake ones. The novel's main thread involves his obsession with Kitty Alexander, a Norma Desmond-like B-movie actress from the 1950s.

One morning Alex, an unlikely hero, awakes from a drug-induced stupor to find that after years of writing to his idol with no response, a postcard with Kitty's autograph has mysteriously found its way to his front door. He sets out to discover whether this is the real thing, or something that a lifetime of longing has caused his fevered brain to dream up.

The Autograph Man indicts our culture's fascination with fame and celebrity worship, where an image is even more valuable than what it stands for. This is fertile, if well-covered, territory. But to make such a common preoccupation rise above the ordinary would require a more subtle treatment than Smith gives it.

With so many disposable subplots, the story feels too convoluted to sustain readers' interest for long. Unfortunately, the sharp portraits and comic timing that animated White Teeth - delivered in prose that was too finely tuned to be effortless - are largely missing here. Where Smith's previous book crackled with restless energy, her latest one gets bogged down as the author tries hard to be clever by throwing in lots of digressive asides like diagrams, pop quizzes and cheesy jokes.

The Autograph May begins with an intriguing glimpse into Alex's relationship with his father, Li-Jin, who's on the verge of dying from a brain tumor. This is set up to be a defining event in the protagonist's life, but it's never fully explored. Alex's inability to mourn his father gives a reason for his trio of childhood friends - Adam, Joseph and Rubinfine - to worry about him. This raises questions about faith for Alex, who is Chinese and Jewish. Despite the intriguing contradictions within his ethnicity, he's so self-absorbed nothing about him runs very deep.

But ultimately the concern of Alex's friends seems misplaced. His emotional coldness is just a sign of his seeming inability to care much about anything beyond his pursuit of Kitty Alexander. He seeks out the former star while he's in New York attending an autograph dealers' conference, which gives him a convenient excuse to abandon his long-suffering girlfriend, Esther, who's going into the hospital to have her pacemaker replaced.

But Esther doesn't fare any worse than the other female characters in the book, who are sketched even less compellingly than their male counterparts. The whole cast is so one-dimensional that they don't make for especially lively traveling companions on this 347-page journey. Many readers may find it increasingly hard to care about what becomes of the characters as the novel meanders to its conclusion.

At several points in the book, Smith seems unsure how to move the story forward without resorting to gimmicks or throwing another marginal character into the mix. This includes frequent examples of the petty swindles autograph dealers perpetrate on each other and the last-minute appearance of a Black call girl modeled on Divine Brown (who was linked to Hugh Grant), who encourages Alex to follow through as he hesitates in making contact with Kitty.

Of course, it would be unfair to expect Smith to replicate the achievement that established her as a young writer with unlimited promise as the author of White Teeth. Even so, her current book is likely to leave readers hoping that she might strike out in some entirely new direction rather than be haunted by the pressure of trying to repeat the formula that first brought her acclaim.

Late in The Autograph Man, Alex looks down from the window of a plane carrying him to New York and wonders how he might look to a bored child thousands of feet below. By this point, the view has become too out of focus to make much sense of.

Rhonda Stewart is a reporter at The Boston Globe.