Influneced by her undergraduate and postgraduate experiences in Cambridge and Harvard, this is a well written satire on the world of the Academy which explores the themes of ethnicity and love. Politics is left mostly hovering in the background, surfacing explicitly on occasion. Which makes this a much more subtle book than Smith's debut 'White Teeth.'
But like that debut, this is a wide ranging and ambitous book. In fact, the greatest compliment one can make about this book, is to demonstrate that Smith is no one-hit wonder and may encourage this reviewer to revisit the most disappointing of Smith's novels, 'The Autograph Man,' to see if it can be improved on a second reading.
She also has an ability to introduce the reader to concepts, they may never have thought of before. This, her most 'American' novel to date and contains a gentle humour, though not as funny as her first novel, but a vast improvement on the second, this book gets 4/5.
No comments:
Post a Comment