The Fraud

It seems rather audacious for me to criticize a novel by a prize-winning author, but honestly I'm not sure what Zadie Smith was trying to accomplish with this long, disjointed and slow Victorian-era novel. Frequent flashback chapters, many undated, didn't help. Only one character was fully developed, but she was primarily a passive witness to events, not the force behind them. The parallels between the titular Fraud's obvious lies and Donald Trump's behavior (also Boris Johnson?) are less than subtle. The chapters devoted to the story of a former Jamaican slave who is the Fraud's staunchest ally leave little more of an impression than “white English people smug about their country's abolition of slavery, willfully ignorant about the source of their imported cotton.”With Charles Dickens as a minor character and George Sand making a cameo appearance, I guess The Fraud is supposed to be an homage to (and satire of) classics like [b:Bleak House 31242 Bleak House Charles Dickens https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1280113147l/31242.SY75.jpg 2960365] and [b:Middlemarch 19089 Middlemarch George Eliot https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1568307771l/19089.SY75.jpg 1461747]. Having recently read both of those tomes, I am not impressed (although props to Smith for calling out Dickens' blatant sexism). I highly recommend Smith's debut novel [b:White Teeth 3711 White Teeth Zadie Smith https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1374739885l/3711.SY75.jpg 7480] and 2016's [b:Swing Time 28390369 Swing Time Zadie Smith https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1514344635l/28390369.SY75.jpg 48487231], but I advise you against investing your valuable reading time in this book's 450+ pages.

It's so good. I feel like I will need to read this book 3 times before I fully comprehend it.

I just finished The Fraud by Zadie Smith and here is my review.

It's 1873 and Mrs. Eliza Touchet is working for her cousin, by marriage, as a housekeeper. He happens to be a novelist, not that he has been famous for many years. She has been the housekeeper for 30 years to both of William's wives.

Andrew Bogle grew up as a slave and understands what happens to slaves on Jamaican sugar plantations. When Andrew finds himself as the star witness in a trial of an imposter, he knows his future relies on him telling the right story.

The trial is all about a low class butcher from Australia claiming he is the rightful heir to a large estate and the trial has Mrs. Touchet gripped, her and all of England. Can the truth ever be revealed?

I was so excited to get this book. I really enjoyed other books by the author and had high hopes. The book was all over the place. I could barely keep up with what POV it was and what time it was for a lot of the book. It wasn't cohesive or structured and it was so hard to get into a flow with the book.

I really enjoyed reading Mrs. Touchet's POV but it was all over the map it felt like a chore to read. The story was fascinating, the plot was exceptional but the execution just wasn't there for me and I was actually glad to be finished.

The book was really well researched and the writing was good, I just didn't like the format of the book, it did not work for me. It did send me down a rabbit hole researching the contents of the book and that made it all so worth it!

If the chapters had been longer and had more meat in each of them with less jumping around, it would have been an easy 5 stars. It pains me to be disappointed in it but it won't put me off more from the author.

3.75 stars.

Thank you @penguinrandomhouseca for my gifted copy