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.