THE FRAUD (Zadie Smith, 2023)

The first of Smith's work that I've finished and loved since her amazing debut, WHITE TEETH: while I've always adored her voice and made it a point to procure each of her releases, I, without fail, stopped caring about what happened to any of her characters around the halfway point and gave up; figured it wouldn't make much of a difference if I knew or not. Correctly or in–, Smith's brilliance and keen perspective always, to me, overshadowed character (indeed, many in previous works felt interchangeable); here, however, her shift to historical fiction brought a new life, a new electricity, that I hadn't felt since WHITE TEETH: like that classic, each voice in THE FRAUD rang true and etched themselves in memory alongside a potent, searing examination of our cultural and racial hypocrisy. Hope she continues to play in history's sandbox: THE FRAUD is something special.