Between Forster and Gilroy: Race and (Re)connection in Zadie Smith's NW

Abstract

This article interprets Zadie Smith's novel NW (2012) as an attempt to connect E. M. Forster's famous dictum "only connect" with Paul Gilroy's concept of "conviviality." NW's representation of two friends who are constituted by boundaries instilled by class, race and ethnicity, but who also contest those limits, points to the difficulties faced by many contemporary European minorities. In NW, the idea of race collaborates with that of ethnicity and class to form a strongly racialized logic through which the immigrant's upward mobility is subtly yet decisively affected. NW suggests that Gilroy's convivial society is only possible with Forsterian, interpersonal connections. Only after Leah and Natalie, the novel's central characters, rekindle their friendship, can they set in motion the novel's closing act of justice. Zadie Smith's fourth novel, NW (2012), closes with an act of justice. Leah Hanwell and Natalie Blake, who had been friends in high school in the London neighborhood of Willesden, suspect that a former classmate of theirs committed a murder and contact the police. First, they send in an anonymous tip but, finding the experience "anticlimactic," decide to make a call instead. 1 Leah and Natalie, who had become alienated during college and subsequently grew apart, connect again while calling the local police station. The narrator captures their act through a reference to their past familiarity and intimacy, which is consequently recreated in the present, with the image of "two heads pressed together over a handset" (p. 294). In this paper, I read this description as a sign of emotional, physical, and personal connection between the two women and take it as my guiding image. I argue that NW can be read as an attempt to relate E. M. Forster's famous dictum "only connect" from his novel Howards End (1910) with Paul Gilroy's ideas on "conviviality" as articulated primarily in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004). 2 Reading together these two concepts-or perhaps intellectual ideals-suggests that creating and sustaining communities that emanate from interpersonal relations can resist the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of racism in contemporary, postcolonial Europe.