‘A person is a bottomless thing’: Zadie Smith and glimpses of grace

Zadie Smith is one of my favourite living novelists. Her latest, The Fraud (2023), takes up the real-life Tichborne case, which captivated the British public in the 1860s-70s.

This historical setting allows Zadie to articulate all kinds of contemporary anxieties around truth in a post-truth world, and about the possibility of justice when a court case becomes a spectacle, or even a piece of theatre.

Although these parallels with the present day were sometimes drawn a little heavy-handedly, Smith’s characteristic warmth in developing her protagonist, Eliza Touchet, more than made up for it. Smith gives voice to feelings, questions and griefs with a depth only a skilled writer can — and with an empathy and a wisdom that suggests she is deeply concerned with, and thoughtful about, the human condition.