Sorry to this man
I don’t care about you William Ainsworth! And I care only a tiny bit more for Mrs Touchet and Bogle. Zadie Smith is a writer I truly love. I’ve read On Beauty twice, her other books once and marvel at the way she can effortlessly switch between characters and locations and sometimes points in time, and I’m fully on board and addicted to the writing. I started off thinking the reason it wasn’t working with the Fraud was because I’m generally not super keen on historical/period fiction, but I just think this book is too full of stuff. The amount of historically accurate stuff Smith clearly found interesting and felt like she should get in totally overtakes the genuinely interesting stuff about Jamaica in the mid 1800s. The navel gazing literary stuff went over my head a bit. The comparisons that could be made about politics then vs politics now were simply meh. Usually when I read books based on true stories I am all deep in the google afterwards but I truly won’t care if I never hear the name Ainsworth again