Search

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith

Jen Teeter-Moore
Aug 10, 2015
3 min read

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton Ltd., 2002 ISBN: 978-0241141731 432 p.p.

The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith is an exploration in the mundane, the holy, and the earthly. Alex-Li Tandem is an Autograph Man, meaning he collects autographs for a living. Alex does not particularly enjoy this job, but he makes really good money doing it and has little other aspirations in life. It is only when he finally has the opportunity to get his most coveted autograph, that of Kitty Alexander, that his life no longer makes sense. This novel is filled with dark humor and a strong narrative, but the diagrams and pictures simply distract the reader.

Smith depicts Alex as a highly intelligent man living a boring life because he does not see a reason to live any other kind of life. His job is easy and grotesque, he lives in a mundane suburb, and he finds it difficult to separate fiction and reality. He lives in a place where people have “based their lives on compromise” and lives a life that lacks authenticity, but he is perfectly happy with this. Alex wants to escape reality. He views his friends and girlfriend, Esther, as actors in his movie: “The great tragedy of his heart was that it always needed to be told a story.” He is a wanderer who actively avoids making real choices.

Alex’s friends are the ones who pressure him to choose a path. He does not care for a life filled with possibility; “he liked the everyday war.” Alex’s father dies from cancer at the beginning of the novel and Alex never really deals with this pain. Instead, he uses pot, homeopathic medicine, and movies to deal. This is coupled with the fact that Alex is Jewish and must honor his father’s death through a ceremony that Alex refuses to perform. His friends see this refusal of rituals as an affront to everything they believe in and an inability on Alex’s part to let go of his father and let himself suffer, but Alex merely wants to move past it. He wants to skip the suffering and go straight to the pleasure. By the end of the novel, Alex does perform the ceremony, but he still feels nothing. When he chooses to suffer and be a real person in the world, he does not understand the point. He searches for a cure from suffering rather than letting suffering cure him.

Alex pretends to be a man with no goals in life, but he does have one autograph that he pines to obtain. For years, he has been sending short descriptive letters to Kitty Alexander, the heroine from the movie he watches almost daily, The Girl from Peking. When his commonplace autograph requests did nothing for him, Alex began to send Kitty short descriptive paragraphs of what she could be doing—very creepy, but somehow it worked. Kitty is his belief system, and he holds onto her perfection. His letters are like prayers and Kitty is his God, but when she finally answers his prayers, and meets him, he has no idea how to handle it. His life has been “spent in the pursuit of fame” and when he is finally close to it, he cannot handle it. The climax is anti-climactic for Alex because by meeting the real Kitty he inherently destroys the fantasy Kitty.

This novel is full of humor and irony, but is also muddled with random short stories, drawings, diagrams, and sub-plots that do little to add to the plot. The plot itself, one filled with an attraction and disgust of pleasure, of delayed suffering, is strong. In The Autograph Man, Smith finds more dark humor coupled with real suffering and is able to unearth the suffering of everyday life.

***

Zadie Smith is an English novelist, essayist, editor, and short story writer. She has published five novels, one novella, and one collection of essays, all of which have received critical praise. White Teeth won numerous awards, including the Whitbread First Novel award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her third novel, On Beauty, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and won the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction. As an editor, she has worked on two novels, Piece of Flesh and The Book of Other People. Smith was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002. In 2010, she joined New York University’s Creative Writing Program as a professor. Smith is currently working on co-writing a space adventure with French director Claire Denis. Smith lives in New York and London with her husband, and her two children.