Zadie Smith’s latest novel is glittering, grand and powerful
Zadie Smith’s ambitious latest novel, The Fraud, is loosely based on the life of the little-known nineteenth-century novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. He was, at one point, as popular as Charles Dickens, his novel Jack Sheppard even outselling Oliver Twist. But Ainsworth’s fortunes and talents declined, and his forty-odd novels vanished, going out of print soon after his death. Throughout The Fraud, as he sits groaning at his desk, he is an arch reminder not only of the vagaries of literary fame, but the pains of fiction-writing. As his cousin Eliza Touchet observes: “God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!” Ainsworth’s actual writing is redolent of educated middle-class male privilege. (“‘Zounds!
