WASHINGTON — Zadie Smith is tucked somewhere back in the corner, in the children's book section, behind a microphone that is lost in the sea of people who have flooded this Olssons store for a Wednesday night reading. The crowd is multicultural, young and old, in business dress and student slob. Bodies fill the aisles, blocking access to literature, fiction, health, sports.
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Providing a piece of her young life
Zadie Smith, who burst onto the literary scene five years ago, proves she's no one-hit wonder with 'On Beauty.'
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday November 26, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 0 inches; 24 words Type of Material: Correction
Martin Amis -- An article in Friday's Calendar section about author Zadie Smith misspelled the last name of British writer Martin Amis as Amos.
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The lines twist through the store, running so deep that those in the back can make out only phrases here and there as Smith stands behind the microphone -- somewhere back there, they assume, because they can't actually see her -- reading an excerpt from her new comic novel, "On Beauty."
She is a literary rock star, Zadie Smith, all of 30 years old and spoken about in the same breath as fellow Brits Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Martin Amos ("a postmodern Charles Dickens," the Washington Post declared her). She is used to the comparisons by now -- after all, they started five years ago, upon the publication of her critically acclaimed first novel, "White Teeth" -- though she finds them somewhat surreal. Surreal, like the fact that Rushdie and McEwan, authors whose books she devoured as a student, are actually her "contemporaries," men she sits next to at literary events, where they exchange chitchat about their work.
"Well, it's not like it's me and Ian and Salman having tea every Tuesday," Smith says, laughing, over mineral water at the Topaz Hotel a few hours before her book-signing.
"I see them at festivals, but we don't hang or anything." Smith is, after all, a working-class girl from the multiethnic north London neighborhood of Willesden Green. She grew up in a tenement flat, the daughter of a white father and a Jamaican mother. She had to beg her way into Cambridge. She is a master of self-deprecation.
"What experiences did you draw upon to develop your characters?" a serious-looking middle-aged man asks at her reading.
Smith laughs.
"Oh, I haven't been anywhere!" she says, and the audience chuckles with her. "That's the beauty of writing fiction. I get to make it up!" Her world, she explains, is that of the books that populated her childhood and continue to be the greatest pleasure of her adult life. Vacations, travel? Her family's idea of a "trip" was a jaunt to Cornwall. "I've never been to Africa or India or anything like that," she says.
