This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Jimmy Buffett, the chiller laureate of Key West, died on Friday at 76. His legacy goes well beyond music: He also parlayed the power of his loyal community into a business empire.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

How American democracy fell so far behind How telling people to die became normal A DeSantis speech too dangerous to teach in Florida You already got into Yale. Now prepare to be rejected.

A Distinctly American Figure

If you have never spent a lunch hour in Times Square at the Margaritaville restaurant, or a cocktail hour at the 5 o’Clock Somewhere bar upstairs, allow me to paint a picture: An enormous shiny flip-flop greets you at the door of the restaurant cum bar cum resort tower. A massive replica of the Statue of Liberty holding a margarita glass pokes through the floor of the restaurant. Should you choose to ascend, a long elevator ride delivers you to the top-floor bar, which features turquoise furniture, tequila drinks on offer, and a beautiful view of Manhattan. Some elements of Margaritaville are kitschy, and some are charming. But above all, when you’re there, you don’t forget for one second that you are in a Margaritaville.

Jimmy Buffett, the troubadour and celebrant of a good-times lifestyle, deserves to be remembered for more than just his music (fun though it may be). Buffett also parlayed his name recognition into a business empire that, starting with the first Margaritaville in Key West, Florida, swelled to include resorts, restaurants, food, and merchandise; Buffett became a billionaire later in life. He was beloved by his many fans, known as Parrot Heads, and he leveraged that fan base into a loyal community of customers. Beyond the Parrot Heads, he also reached hungry and thirsty visitors of all stripes: Some 20 million people visit Margaritaville-branded establishments annually.

In recent years, a variety of brands have become obsessed with building community. Tech start-ups in particular have glommed on to it as a marketing buzzword. If people feel connected to a brand, the thinking goes, they will buy more stuff. Buffett was an early master of this art: He was selling goods and services, but he was also offering a sense of belonging. And though it has become de rigueur for celebrities to peddle branded products, be it skin care or tequila, Buffett has been translating pop-culture recognition into product sales for decades.

Buffett was a multi-hyphenate before it was cool. He first became known as a musician, with his beach hit “Margaritaville” in 1977 and, the next year, his cheeky “Cheeseburger in Paradise.” He was also an author: Starting in 1989, both his fiction and nonfiction books topped the New York Times best-seller lists (a distinction he shares with an elite smattering of writers, including Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Dr. Seuss). He had a Broadway show. Margaritaville sold frozen shrimp, blenders, margarita mixes, and a lifestyle. The New York Times reported that Margaritaville Enterprises, a corporation with ties to more than 100 restaurants and hotels, brought in $2.2 billion in gross annual revenue last year, largely through licensing and branding deals. Though Margaritaville Resort Times Square recently began Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, Margaritaville Enterprises is reportedly still investing in new properties.

For a man who made his name on visions of relaxation, Buffett got things done. As Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 2018, “Mr. Buffett is still the lone occupant in the Venn diagram of People Who Outearn Bruce Springsteen and People Who Are Mistaken for Men of Leisure.” Though a 23andMe test reportedly confirmed that Jimmy was not related to Warren Buffett, the two men became friends, and the latter offered business advice to the former; Jimmy called him “Uncle Warren.” (The Oracle of Omaha is also an investor in Margaritaville Enterprises through subsidiaries of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Jimmy Buffett even created literal Margaritaville communities: Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote a long dispatch in The New Yorker recounting his time visiting Latitude Margaritaville, a “55 and better” active-living community in Florida. Paumgarten notes the sense of belonging that Latitude Margaritaville provides its older residents—even if it comes with a heavy dose of hedonism. “If it’s isolation that ails us—our suburban remove, our reliance on cars, our dwindling circles of friends, our lack of congregation and integration and mutual understanding, of the kind described by Robert Putnam in ‘Bowling Alone,’” Paumgarten writes, “then the solution, especially for those tilting into their lonelier elderly years, would seem to be fellowship, activity, fun. In the Margaritaville calculus, the benefits of good company outweigh the deleterious effects of alcohol.” (As it happened, Paumgarten’s article was published the day before my first visit to the Times Square location next to my then-office; the sweet—and also thoroughly capitalist—context about Buffett’s empire enhanced what was already a novel experience.)

Buffett’s Florida development, Paumgarten wrote, “came off both as an escape from America and as the most quintessentially American setting of all.” And Buffett himself was a distinctly American figure—a canny self-mythologizer who brought people joy and made very good money along the way. I hope you all will embrace your license to chill in his honor. As they might say at Margaritaville: Fins up. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

Related:

Make the collabs stop. Why celebrities partner with cannabis companies

Today’s News

All the defendants in the election-interference case in Fulton County, Georgia, have now pleaded not guilty. Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys national chairman, was sentenced to 22 years in prison, after being convicted for seditious conspiracy in the January 6, 2021, attack. Senator Mitch McConnell released a letter from Congress’s attending physician stating that evaluations ruled out a stroke or seizure, after McConnell visibly froze on camera on two recent occasions.

Evening

Vivian Maier / Howard Greenberg Gallery

The Novel That Helped Me Understand American Culture

By Rafaela Bassili

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What really happens when Americans stop going to church Okay, the 1980s Lakers were great—what else? Winners of the Bird Photographer of the Year 2023

Culture Break

Illustration by Chloe Niclas

Read. Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, puts the genre of fiction on trial.

Watch. Gran Turismo, in theaters, is luxuriously familiar.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Tom here, peeking in after reading Lora’s essay on Jimmy Buffett. Buffett’s last public appearance was just up the way from me here at a venue in Rhode Island, and when I heard he’d died, I was on my way to a nearby beach. I reminisced with my wife a bit as we drove to the shore about how I didn’t appreciate Buffett when I was growing up, mostly because “Margaritaville” was overplayed when I was a teenager. Also, I didn’t really get that whole Gulf and Western sound. My New England (I was raised near the mountains) doesn’t seem like Jimmy Buffett’s natural environment: The beach is far, the water’s cold, and the first snows come soon after the last beach day.

But when I moved to Rhode Island in my 20s, I spent my first summer at the beach and the Newport bars, where Buffett’s music was everywhere. One day, I heard “Son of a Son of a Sailor,” and it clicked. The beach wasn’t really the point. The palm trees and tropical nights and steel drums? Those were just the decor. That day in Newport, I realized that you didn’t need a beach to love Jimmy Buffett, whose music was so kind, so American, and so fun. The next day, I went to the local record store and bought my first Buffet CD. After that, no matter where I lived, I always had a beach and a friend.

— Tom

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Watch New Zealand's "monster" sixes as they beat England by six wickets at Trent Bridge to draw the four-match T20 series.

Watch the best shots from England opener Jonny Bairstow's 73 against New Zealand in the fourth and final T20 at Trent Bridge.

England are convincingly beaten by six wickets by New Zealand in the fourth T20 at Trent Bridge as the Black Caps fight back to draw the series 2-2.

Flanker Tom Curry is ready to play for England in their World Cup opener against Argentina after returning from an ankle injury.

Growing up in São Paulo, Brazil, I spent many of my waking hours reading American young-adult books, rigorously studying the mechanics of American teenage life. These books weren’t always beautifully written, but I loved them all the same, the way another kid might have loved dinosaurs: I was compelled by their exoticism; their observations about proms, parking lots, and malls; their descriptions of what girls in the U.S. ate and how they lived. None of it had anything to do with me, so I was surprised when, at 16, I saw myself in Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and a thinly veiled avatar for Plath herself. Plath’s acerbic prose paralyzed me with envy; her novel unlocked a sorrowful and rage-filled side to a language I had only experienced as functional and rigid.

With a diligent thirst for knowledge, I began to understand Plath’s reputation as an archetypal mid-century American girl. The legend of Plath is inextricable from the visual mythology of postwar prosperity—white picket fences, images of John and Jackie Kennedy sailing—that developed alongside the baby boom. The Bell Jar, with its sneering descriptions of ski trips to the Adirondacks and boys who ran cross-country, offered me permission to write a certain way: intensely, cuttingly, in English. It also provided an emotional context for the East Coast culture I found so alluring, and that I’d been trying to figure out. But my teenage self missed part of the novel’s project: its effort to tear down the veneer of complacent satisfaction that enveloped the American suburban lifestyle.  

The Bell Jar first appeared in England 60 years ago, a month before the author’s suicide, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. After a copyright battle, it was finally published in the United States in 1971 with Plath’s name on the cover. The novel begins when Esther leaves her small town in Massachusetts for New York City, having won a coveted spot for a summer job at Ladies’ Day magazine (a fictionalized version of Mademoiselle). The glitz and artifice of the fashion world shock and repel her; upon her return to the cloistered suburbs, she comes undone. The plot culminates with her suicide attempt and her stay at a mental institution, based on Plath’s own experience at the renowned McLean Hospital.

Today, the novel is seen as a poignant account of the stifling oppression of the Eisenhower years, particularly as experienced by young women. In the introduction to her recent biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, Heather Clark writes that The Bell Jar “exposed a repressive Cold War America that could drive even ‘the best minds’ of a generation crazy.” In life, Plath had trouble squaring her idea of herself as an ambitious writer with the expectations held for a girl like her—to marry young and start producing children. Some of the impact of her poetry emerged from this misalignment. Oft-quoted lines from her poem “Edge” read: “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment.” Clark, parsing the image, notes, “Only a dead woman is ‘perfected.’ Not perfect, perfected––like … something controlled, without agency.”

The Bell Jar’s achievement, in turn, was to paint a portrait of America full of jagged inconsistencies. “I was supposed to be having the time of my life,” Esther declares in the first couple of pages. Described as “drinking martinis … in the company of several anonymous young men with all-American bone structures,” she embodies the mid-century’s ideal of an accomplished, educated girl—but only up to a point. At Ladies’ Day, Esther, an aspiring poet, hopes to discuss literature with her editor; instead, her goals are treated with condescension. On campus, her sense of achievement is limited to four years of pseudo-freedom that are supposed to climax in marriage to a respectable Yale medical student, for whom she is expected to “flatten out … like Mrs. Willard’s [her would-be mother-in-law] kitchen mat.” This prospect––which would assure a secure, suburban life––is an urgent threat to someone who desires the tumult of experience; it makes Esther feel “very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

[Read: Why Sylvia Plath still haunts American culture]

Pitted against her decaying sense of self, the overdone polish of the Northeast becomes sinister. Taut prose elucidates this feeling: Swimming far from the shore, Esther considers drowning before admitting to a self-preservation instinct (“I knew when I was beaten”). Longer, more rambling sentences describe the off-kilter beauty of the landscape, and how it corresponds to Esther’s mood: Driving to the Adirondacks, “the countryside, already deep under old falls of snow, turned us a bleaker shoulder, and as the fir trees crowded down from the gray hills to the road edge, so darkly green they looked black, I grew gloomier and gloomier.”

Writing about the novel, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick observed that “the pleasures and sentiments of youth––wanting to be invited to the Yale prom, losing your virginity––are rather unreal in a scenario of disintegration, anger, and a perverse love of the horrible.” As a teen eager to understand these signifiers of American adolescence, I was drawn to that sense of unreality, even as I responded to Esther’s frustrations with her codified environment. From the writing, I understood that the purportedly joyful rituals of growing up were attended by rage, but Plath was also gesturing at a source for this rage: the culture that created these rituals in the first place.  

The title of the novel, as readers might recall, is an image of Esther’s claustrophobia: Trapped by her surroundings and her depression alike, Esther feels as though she will always be “sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in [her] own sour air.” According to Clark’s biography, Plath considered an ending that would see Esther going to Europe, fleeing the brutality of the Northeast. It was what Plath did herself; she wrote her best work—The Bell Jar and Ariel, the poetry collection that propelled her to posthumous fame—while living in England. In this sense, The Bell Jar’s mistrust of suburban prosperity can be read as a precursor to later works that similarly explore the dark underside of small-town America; it is often paired with Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, its influence deeply felt on the depiction of the Lisbon girls. And Esther’s description of the grimy hole in her mother’s basement, into which she crawls to attempt suicide, calls to mind the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, when the camera digs under an immaculate suburban lawn to reveal the rot lurking underneath.

Plath’s writing and biography seem to indicate that what she really wanted was freedom: to be herself and to wear her contradictions on her sleeve. But that aspiration was accompanied by an obsession with emphasizing the distance between herself and others—and, by the same token, stereotyping those she was defining herself against. As the writer Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman, her book about Plath’s legend and biographies, critics including Leon Wieseltier and Irving Howe have criticized Plath’s appropriation of the suffering of the Jewish people in her poetry: Through her use of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy,” she equates her individual pain to the generational trauma caused by Nazism. And in The Bell Jar, as in poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” her fetishization of difference could be a myopic way to assert her distinction from those she seemed to see as beneath her.

As such, the novel occasionally enacts the overbearing homogeneity that characterized the America Plath supposedly held in contempt. Racist imagery pervades the text: the anti-Black sentiment that emerges in her description of a Black worker in the hospital where Esther is institutionalized is particularly unsettling. In the first few pages, Esther compares her pallor to the skin of a “Chinaman,” and my own home country is a symbol of faraway exoticism: On a humid day, the rain “wasn’t the nice kind … that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they have in Brazil.” The bell jar that descended over the suburbs seemed to come into focus for Plath only insofar as her entrapment went. She couldn’t quite look outside of herself to see how that bell jar might be suffocating for others.

[Read: The haunting last letters of Sylvia Plath]

When I first read The Bell Jar, New England was an abstract concept to me: a made-up place where the push and pull of conformity and subversion appeared to emerge in perfect clarity. Growing up in a country that idealized the American experience, I held Plath’s America at a remove. Like a Norman Rockwell painting, it stood still in time, immoveable, sentimental, and untrue. To revisit the book now, as an adult who has lived in the United States for almost a decade, is to see the idea of a romantic, preppy East Coast collapse under the harsh, more revealing light of experience. Plath’s novel didn’t materialize out of those beautiful images of coastal American adolescence; it was born of a thorny, damaging relationship with an environment that could be as cruel as it was rewarding.

In college, I fell in love with a boy from Massachusetts and went to see New England for myself. Everything looked just as I’d expected it to, even if, in the past 70 or so years, a lot had changed; not least of all the fact that, according to a University of Massachusetts at Boston report from 2020, the state is home to the second largest Brazilian population in the country. But the air in Massachusetts is thick with history, and its cunning appearance still compels. The sight of those colonial houses surrounded by maple and pine, their floors trod on by feet clad in G. H. Bass loafers, combined with the strange recognition of visiting a place I’d only ever imagined before, kept me tethered to Plath’s own descriptions. Still, as much as her legend insists that she was a prototypical all-American girl, Plath died a foreigner and an outsider. The last dinner party she ever attended, according to Clark’s biography, was at the English house of family friends from home.

It took me years to realize that no matter how diligently I studied the America I initially saw in Plath’s work, I would always be foremost a foreigner and an outsider—someone with a tormented predilection for a culture that excludes, confines, and punishes you for not fitting in. Still, I like to think that Plath wrote The Bell Jar for those who, like me and her, are seized and haunted by certain images and certain notions—even those that may, at any point, turn on us.

Is there anything worse than a novel? Is there anyone more vain, more laughable, more exploitative yet morally self-serious than the novelist? Or, as the protagonist of Zadie Smith’s sixth novel puts it: “ ‘Oh what does it matter what that man thinks of anything? He’s a novelist!’ Without meaning to, she had spoken in the same tone with which one might say He’s a child.”

The Fraud opens with an uneasy meeting on a novelist’s doorstep in 19th-century London. A “filthy boy” stands at the entrance to a respectable home in Tunbridge Wells, face-to-face with a formidable, black-haired Scottish woman. She is Eliza Touchet, the cousin of William Ainsworth, the novelist, and she has called the boy to fix a crater that has opened up in the house. The second-floor library has caved in under the weight of an absurd number of books, dumping plaster and volumes of British history all over the downstairs parlor.

Inspecting the damage, the boy is disapproving: “The sheer weight of literature you’ve got here, well, that will put a terrible strain on a house, Mrs Touchet. Terrible strain.” When Eliza readily agrees, the boy feels a flicker of anxiety. “Was she laughing at him? Perhaps ‘literature’ was the wrong word. Perhaps he had pronounced it wrong.” He says no more and kneels to measure the size of the hole.

The metaphor is not subtle. This will be a book about the dead weight of literature; the saggy, impractical, possibly elitist enterprise of revering it; the ambivalences and frustrations involved in making it; the embarrassing excess of it all. This will also be a novel about the fear of using the “wrong word,” or the right word the wrong way, and what happens when that fear curdles into resentment.

These are topics of the moment, at least in the world of literary criticism. “Siri, what was the novel?” the New York Times critic Dwight Garner asked in a recent review “advancing an argument that’s been plausibly made for centuries: that literature is dead.” (Garner states that Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, published in 2000, was probably the last novel that “mattered.”) Smith, a literary critic herself, asked, “Do we know what fiction was?” in an essay for The New York Review of Books in 2019, wondering how viable the enterprise remains. The Fraud poses this question in the contested genre itself.

Eliza Touchet, as it happens, wasn’t making fun of the boy—she’s revolted by the pursuit of literature herself. Since being widowed in her early 20s, she has functioned as factotum and housekeeper for her writer cousin, originally helping his wife, Frances, care for their children whenever he had the itch to run off to Europe to “see beauty and write.” After Frances died, Eliza moved in to help finish raising the children, and she has become Ainsworth’s right hand: his first reader, his lover, the hostess of the literary salons he throws for his friends Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Cruikshank, and so forth. Ainsworth, whose career thrived during his younger years, is charming and prolific, but also conceited, out of touch, and a mediocre talent. By the time the ceiling caves in, he’s a has-been in denial, churning out historical fiction—a genre Eliza considers regrettable—that no one wants to read.

Eliza sits down to comment on Ainsworth’s latest manuscript, which is as she expects it to be: boring, badly written, and completely unoriginal. “Everything had been used before or was lifted from life … From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.” Ainsworth, anxious, demands to know what she thinks. Eliza declares it a triumph.

Both Ainsworth and Touchet are based on real people—William Ainsworth was a popular novelist of the Victorian era, more successful than even his friend Dickens in their early careers. His work has been largely forgotten, and very little is known about his cousin by marriage, Eliza Touchet, whom Smith adopts as the protagonist for this book. In other words, The Fraud is historical fiction, the regrettable genre. There are echoes of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch Eliza admires. The obsession with social mores and manners, alongside extended scenes of drawing-room gossip, recalls Jane Austen. This is not merely a novel; it is a pastiche of the Great English Novels. (This is a familiar feature in Smith’s fiction: On Beauty was a riff on E. M. Forster’s Howards End ; NW is in fairly explicit dialogue with the work of Virginia Woolf.)

Presiding over it all is the specter of Dickens. In the world of The Fraud, Dickens’s ascension to the role of Great Novelist is a thorn in Ainsworth’s side. Eliza objects to Dickens on ethical grounds: Though he is renowned as a kind of genius-saint, credited with surpassing sympathy for the plight of the working man, Eliza knows him to be something closer to a vulture—or a pickpocket. He and Ainsworth hang around the working poor not out of any humanitarian impulse but in search of material. They want to appropriate their language and sell it to the middle class as entertainment. “Keep stealing, my friends! From life for fiction, and from fiction for life. What a terrible business,” she thinks. “At least William did it clumsily, with benign incompetence. Whereas his friend Charles had done it like a master—like an actor. That was precisely what was so dangerous about him.”

Smith herself wrestles, as she recently wrote in a New Yorker essay, with the legacy of Dickens’s mark on the genre. Dickens adapted the novel into a mode of social commentary, which transformed it into a political tool—and elevated the novelist to a new moral and political stature. He didn’t only write great stories; he critiqued the poverty, hypocrisy, greed, and inhumanity of British society. He did what novelists today are under pressure to do: He was brilliantly entertaining, incisively political, wildly best-selling, and world-changing.

But are novelists effective or reliable enough to be tasked with representing the political and social realities around them? Smith seems unsure. She called fiction “our indefensible art” in her 2019 essay about the genre’s purposes and methods, wading into the controversy over writers inhabiting subjective positions different from their own—white American women writing Mexican-refugee characters, say, an example that soon stirred debate. Is this appropriation and parasitism, or is it imaginative empathy? “Has fiction, over the centuries, been the creator of compassion or a vehicle for containment? I think we can make both cases.” Either way, Smith argues, occupying other consciousnesses is inescapable for the novelist. She recalls seeing, when she was young, a cartoon of Charles Dickens:

The image of contentment, surrounded by all his characters come to life. I found that image comforting. Dickens didn’t look worried or ashamed. Didn’t appear to suspect he might be schizophrenic or in some other way pathological. He had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too.

Portrayed this way, the novelist is not just an individual but a chorus of humanity, many distinct selves held within and expressed by a single mind. Smith’s understanding of herself as a writer is related to a desire to air “all the other voices inside me, serving to make the idea of my ‘own voice’ indistinct.” This is a lovely notion of what fiction can be: an art form in which the self operates as a gateway into a realm of other selves, enabled by “a kind of awareness, attended by questions. What is it like to be that person? To feel what they feel? I wonder. Can I use what I feel to imagine what the other feels?”

This conception of fiction also suggests that the novel is inescapably a kind of self-portraiture, one that may contain insights about society and contemporary politics and ideology and all the rest, but in a terribly limited way. What Dickens is doing in a work like Oliver Twist, Eliza insists, isn’t benevolent fabrication or ethical social commentary; he’s merely reflecting his own obsessions, desires, ego. These conflicting truths happen to coexist, Smith suggests: The novelist is ideally expansive beyond the self; the novelist is always blinkered by the self. Whether the work is defensible has less to do with this double bind than with the writing itself, she argues. “Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain type of sentence … If the sentences don’t speak to me, nothing else will.”

The central irony of The Fraud is that the professional novelist writes bad sentences and ignores the greatest plot of the age. Ainsworth works away on his historical novels while London raptly follows the Tichborne trial. The trial (a real sensation in the early 1870s) features a man claiming to be the long-lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. The heir, Roger Tichborne, was supposed to have disappeared at sea as a 25-year-old; now, 10 years later, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, has appeared in England claiming to be Roger. Most of the family insists that he’s an impostor, and not a very good one. The Claimant, as he is called, bears little resemblance to Roger Tichborne. He doesn’t recognize family members. He doesn’t speak any French, which was Roger Tichborne’s first language. And so on.

Still, the trial becomes a flash point for social tensions. The working classes take to the Claimant, seeing him as a symbol of their own social and economic oppression. The educated classes and aristocracy regard him as a fraud, a laughingstock, and a threat. The divide surfaces in the Ainsworth household as well. Ainsworth’s new and very young bride, Sarah, his former maid whom he impregnated, is a passionate fan of the Claimant. Ainsworth and Eliza consider him ridiculous. Still, Eliza agrees to accompany Sarah to watch the trial.

There, she is entranced by Andrew Bogle, the formerly enslaved Jamaican man who served Roger Tichborne’s father and insists that the Claimant is the real heir. Even before Eliza hears him speak, Bogle’s posture and demeanor inspire in her a new kind of awareness, along with questions. She wants to know his story. She wants, in spite of herself, to write about him. Against her better judgment, she begins working on a novel.

“The Fraud” is the title of the manuscript that Eliza embarks on as she attends the trial, and putatively it refers to the figure at the center of that case, though of course—wink!—the book has any number of frauds worth laying bare or laughing at. There is Ainsworth, still parading as a literary titan. Dickens instrumentalizes the people he is beloved for humanizing. Eliza herself is a fraud of many descriptions: a woman with an unorthodox sexual history (she has carried on affairs with both Ainsworth, whom she dominates sexually, and his first wife, whom she loved) masked as an upright Catholic spinster; a woman who scorns novelists and yet finds herself becoming one in secret.

Smith positions language as the instrument by which all of this fraud is committed. Language is a commodity, a weapon, and a disguise. Sarah cosplays at being a lady of highborn status by abandoning the vernacular of her class and using the word naturally as much as possible. Unfortunately, she can’t remember when to pronounce her H’s. She has no chance: She will never pass.

Smith has long been fascinated by, and is expertly attuned to, the authority and status conferred on those who can wield language entertainingly or persuasively. This is the novelist’s prowess—and the politician’s and the swindler’s. Philosophically, she seems uneasy about the indistinct boundary between the person who uses words to make art and the one who uses words to manipulate others for power. (Is there a difference?) This anxiety plays out in every corner of the novel.

The Claimant himself is suspected of lying because he speaks with a cockney accent, not with the elevated inflections of the Tichbornes. One of the primary debates surrounding the trial is how great a linguistic transformation is possible—a proxy for a more foundational cultural debate happening in Great Britain about who gets to decide what class you belong to or can rise to. You or the state? You or society? How would you need to sound—what words would you need to say—to be believed?

Smith also dwells on what it means to be a poor stylist, showcasing Ainsworth’s hilariously bad sentences as evidence of an aesthetic and intellectual deficiency but also a moral one. “He was besotted with his project, especially the ‘flash songs,’ sung by the criminal and cockney underworld characters, and written in the ‘cant’ slang he had picked up somewhere,” Eliza notes. Where? she asks him. He stole it from someone else’s memoir.

Eliza, who functions in part as an avatar for Smith’s ideas and concerns as a novelist, is initially set up as Ainsworth’s foil—the true novelist, preoccupied with the problem of interiority, and the challenge of genuinely accessing it in others. “What world did they live in, and what unknown and perhaps unknowable mental landscape formed it?” she wonders at the sight of “strange strangers” as she walks down the street. “Could it be deciphered? Guessed at? What can we know of other people?”

If this sounds a little sophomoric, that’s because Eliza’s moral imagination and curiosity are only barely more sophisticated than Ainsworth’s. Despite the revelation that she—a woman who feels herself a social outsider—might share a deep sensibility with someone like Bogle, she is ill-equipped to perceive his full humanity or subjectivity, a fact that becomes clear as The Fraud progresses. She doesn’t even take seriously the humanity of the other woman she lives with, Sarah, whom she dismisses as a vulgar idiot until, finally, Sarah demands her dignity: “ ‘No, you’ll let me speak,’ said Sarah, with a new authority. ‘I say: I know what you think of me. But where I’ve come from you can’t imagine.’ ”

Over and over, The Fraud insists on the duty of the novelist to deeply imagine the other—a project that may be doomed to fail but remains worth attempting. Smith was a convincing mouthpiece for this argument in The New York Review of Books not simply because she’s a persuasive critic but because she has made a career writing novels that do this well. White Teeth, whether or not you agree that it’s the last novel that mattered, garnered early fame for Smith precisely because of the kaleidoscopic (somewhat Dickensian) array of humanity she captured in her characters. Through her subsequent fiction, especially her novel Swing Time and her story collection Grand Union, this has remained a strength of Smith’s.

And yet her characters this time around—Eliza, Ainsworth, Sarah, and the rest—feel more like archetypes than like people. They do not come alive in the sentences, many of which read like wooden imitation (or unsteady satire) of 19th-century literary argot. The Fraud works perhaps better as a meta-novel, an allegory that advances ideas about the novel, than as a novel itself. It doesn’t quite offer the pleasure of sinking into the consciousness of another person, or even, despite the Victorian particulars, into the texture of a different place and time. The book explicitly signals that this would be a desired effect: In one scene, a younger Eliza looks into a stereoscope that shows three-dimensional images of Ceylon. She’s dismissive at first. Why invent a device for seeing the world in three dimensions when you can just look at the world with your own eyes, right in front of you?

This made everybody laugh, but when it was her turn to put her eyes to the strange machine Mrs Touchet lost her sense of humor. A view of Ceylon. A distant mountain, a lake, three mysterious people in a curious boat. All framed by unknown trees she would never see, not for herself, not in this lifetime.

She is immersed. She is beyond herself. This is what a novel can do. This is what The Fraud does not quite do, perhaps because—although the book, at more than 450 pages, is long—Smith is trying to deliver so much else: a rendering of London culture in the 19th century, a commentary on the recently abolished British colonial slave trade, a dramatization of a years-long court case, a Victorian BDSM queer romance. Smith is testing just how much the form can convey about the machinations of empire, gender, creativity, self-determination, and power—and how much the form can convey about itself. The weight of fictional ambition flattens her characters. The book seems, in moments, like a contest between Smith the novelist and Smith the critic, and the critic proves stronger.

Eliza herself acts from motives that are left vague. What drives her, for example, to write? How does she understand what she’s doing as she ventures into the creative and ethical territories she has disparaged others for treading on? What would artistic success in this form look like to her? More than once, I puzzled over what she wanted. But then, maybe Eliza doesn’t fully know what she wants, or why she does what she does. We are mysteries to ourselves, first and foremost—even, or especially, novelists.

This article appears in the October 2023 print edition with the headline “Zadie Smith Has Doubts About Fiction.”

The England star, who has spoken out in support of LGBTQ rights, apologises for hurt caused by his move to Al Ettifaq.

England midfielder Jordan Henderson says criticism of his move to Saudi Arabian club Al-Ettifaq "really hurt".