The game of the name
Zenga Longmore
THE AUTOGRAPH MAN by Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp.419, ISBN 0241139988 he weight of Zadie Smith's literary reputation is so hefty that her latest novel, The Autograph Man, was longlisted for the Booker prize before it was even finished. Along with its author, I appeared to be the only humanoid on planet Earth who did not rhapsodise over White Teeth. I felt it misrepresented the noble people of Harlesden. Zadie Smith, being of a more earthy persuasion, described her first novel as 'fairly rubbish'.
What a magical surprise it was to discover that The Autograph Man is the most pleasurable read I have had in an age. Zadie Smith has matured into a novelist of dazzling, original skill. The Autograph Man is a sardonic view of fame, symbols and religious mysticism, but don't let that put you off. It is essentially a comic Jewish novel.
The action begins with 12-year-old AlexLi Tandem's Chinese father attempting to make a man of his son by taking him to see a wrestling match at the Royal Albert Hall. Accompanying them are two friends of Alex's, Adam Jacobs, a black New Yorker, and Mark Rubinfine. an accountant's son. All three boys are Jewish, and all attend the same synagogue in Mountjoy, a fictional north London suburb. Whilst waiting for the fight to begin, the youngsters fall into conversation with Joseph, a weedy pre-pubescent mite with an intense passion for collecting autographs and celebrity memorabilia. Joseph's sinister father cuts the conversation short, and the show begins. Afterwards, everyone troops backstage to gawp at Giant Haystack and Big Daddy. Naturally enough, autographs are gleaned.
A jump into modern Mountjoy and the next chapter finds Alex-Li to have become the autograph man of the title. His trade is buying and selling the squiggles famous people make on paper. He is not a success. He has spent half his life pining for the autograph of a Forties film star named Kitty Alexander, the woman to whom he has been writing every week for 13 years. He has never received a reply. Kitty is a star of Garboesque elusiveness. Her personal squiggle is rare and therefore valuable.
Kitty was as awkward and invisible as Jehovah. She was aloof ... For a long time Kitty Alexander's autograph has been one of the most sought after scribbles in this peculiar world. Most Autograph Men had given up hope of ever getting one.
In between collecting scribbles and squiggles, he is working on a book about Jewishness versus Goyishness. (It set me wondering about Jewishness. What is it? Is it a race? If so, how can people of African, Chinese and European extraction all be Jewish? And if it is a religion, why do so
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