Fiction Mondays: Autograph Man

This week's book (yes, I'm trying to read a book every week) was Zadie Smith's "Autograph Man," her follow-up to "White Teeth," and a book that seemed to suffer from ridiculously high expectations. It seems to be a pretty common occurrence for second novels when the author's debut was insanely great (see: the reviews of Joshua Ferris' "The Unnamed"), but I tried not to let the critical reaction influence my reading at all. Here's a confession: I love second novels like this. They're like second albums, the long-awaited follow-ups that everyone agrees will never be as great as the first one. So I tried to go into this novel without expectations, so I could take it for what it was.

The story follows Alex-Li Tandem, a Chinese-Jewish-British collector of Autographs, in the week leading up to the anniversary of his father's death, when he is expected to perform kaddish in front of his friends and family. Along the way, he tries to obtain an autograph of Kitty Alexander, a 1950s film star, and to make up with his girlfriend, who has a broken finger because Alex wrecked his car while she was his passenger.

The story is about a character who is looking for redemption, but it's a take on that type of story where the character actively rejects redemption or tries to avoid it. He's drunk or stoned for a large portion of the book; he alienates the people around him; when his girlfriend has to go in for surgery, Alex leaves for New York. Every time you think he's going to have a relevatory moment, he screws up (my personal favorite is a time when he decides to go to the bar and drink alphabetically instead of going home). He's like the protagonist of Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" in that he knows exactly what he should do to be a better person and actively does the opposite thing. It's an odd character type, and one that could have been really alienating from another author, but Zadie Smith moves the story forward with such momentum and surrounds Alex with such a great cast that it makes it more exciting--while you read it, you wonder if she will pull it off, and how it will be done.

It's difficult to discuss too much of the plot without revealing too much, but I will talk about the structure and the religious aspects of the book. The novel is divided into two sections (well, three if you count the long prologue and four if you count the epilogue), each corresponding to a different religious idea. The first section is called "The Kabbalah of Alex-Li Tandem," divided into ten chapters that correspond to the ten "sefirot," which I took to understand from the novel's forays into discussions of mysticism as ten aspects of God in humans. They're the steps a person has to take to achieve mystic enlightenment. The second section is called "The Zen of Alex-Li Tandem," and is based on a story involving a bull. It's not really elaborated on, but if I can guess (based on my own reading of Zen Buddhist books), I would say it's a metaphor for enlightenment--going out and seeking the bull, taming the bull, and carrying it forth into the world seems to correspond to achieving enlightenment and going through life in that manner. Maybe I am wrong, though.

The real meaning of this religious structure and the mysticism doesn't become clear until the last few pages of the book, when Alex's personal history and his friend Adam's forays into mysticism finally converge in a really beautiful moment where Alex shows some hope that he's not completely irredeemable. The ending is really interesting, and again I won't spoil it, but it's a scene that ties all of the characters together (and this is something Zadie Smith tends to do, isn't it? There's that scene at the reveal of the supermouse in "White Teeth," and that scene of the character's reading at the end of "On Beauty"...) while also exploring the religious themes and the nature of the past and present.

It's a quick read, a really interesting book. I can see why it didn't fare so well with critics; I mean, it's not as fantastic as "White Teeth," and it doesn't have that complexity or the giant cast, and at times it seems like some of the supporting characters aren't as fleshed out as they could be. But at the same time, it's a novel that, despite its flaws, has a lot of passion, a lot of belief in why the character's story needs to be told. It kind of ties into this thought I had recently about which sticks with you more, the story that is technically perfect and polished to the point of austerity, or a story that's a little messy but obviously cared-about by its writer and with genuine passion? I think I'd rather have the mess than a hermetically-sealed perfect story anytime.