"What Can We Know of Other People?" Zadie Smith's “The Fraud” and New Sincerity
The Fraud by Zadie Smith (Penguin, 2023)
Reviewed by Brody Eldridge
"People lie to themselves. People lie to themselves all the time" theorizes Eliza Touchet, the protagonist of Zadie Smith's The Fraud (389). Mrs. Touchet, a real historical woman, comes to this conclusion after spending her time sitting in the court and observing the famous Victorian "Tichborne case," one of the main plots of Smith's novel. Roger Tichborne was thought lost and dead at sea in 1854. In 1866, Arthur Orton came forward claiming to be the lost Tichborne and seeking his title, which conveniently included the Tichborne family fortune. Though the “Claimant” actually hailed from a Wagga Wagga butcher shop, he rallied the people, convinced Lady Tichborne that he was her lost son, and ended up in a long court case which ultimately concluded that he was a "fraud."
Although The Fraud is a historical novel, it takes place mostly through Mrs. Touchet's point of view, and Smith's non-linear narrative tends to focus more on the characters and concepts than a straight shot plot. We meet numerous characters through Mrs. Touchet's narration, all real people like William Ainsworth, Charles Dickens, and Arthur Orton or the "Claimant." The larger plot points, like the Tichborne case and the feud(s) between William Ainsworth and many other Victorian authors and illustrators, are all based on real events and encounters. For the most part, Smith stays focused on Mrs. Touchet and her domestic life with the Ainsworths (she is a cousin by marriage to William, but then widow). Mrs. Touchet's narrative spans her life roughly from when she met William to his death in 1882. Sometimes she jumps back in time, to the 1830s where she reminisces on William's first wife, Fanny, but she mostly sticks to the novel's present, the 1870s. This is the time of the Tichborne case where Mrs. Touchet sits in the court and observes with William's second (and low class) wife Sarah, who ecstatically defends the Claimant.
There's no hiding that Smith intends to use the Tichborne case as an examination of the current American political atmosphere and specifically in connection to "you-know-who" (which is also Mrs. Touchet's title for the Claimant). Those who stand by the Claimant are known as "fools and fanatics" and they proudly accept these anti-establishment monikers (434-5). The Claimant channels populist ideals by rallying against the "Catholics" and their "shadowy business," the legal system which denies him his true name, and doctors with their "smallpox vaccinations." When the court initially charges the Claimant with perjury, we see Sarah Ainsworth join the outraged crowd at the court which then moves to Regent Street because "Sir Roger needs his people by his side. He ain't abandoned!" (232).
Smith does not hand hold the reader while she writes about the Tichborne case; instead, readers must piece together the finer political nuance on their own. At times this is confusing, but it is altogether rewarding because Smith does not just want to recreate a mirror for our times in the Victorian era. Throughout the book, she pursues the question of why people "lie to themselves" and support political frauds.
Halfway into the novel, Andrew Bogle, former slave and now servant of the Tichborne family, enters the picture, and Smith dedicates a fourth of the page count to telling his story from his point of view. Despite promises of a reward for those who can bring to light information on the lost Sir Roger, Bogle, who is one of the first to help champion the Claimant's return to the Tichborne family, receives no such gift of money. In fact, Bogle's losses for his actions are striking: Bogle loses his pension with the Tichbornes because he stands by the Claimant. He says, "and now it seems all is lost. But I shall be staunch for Sir Roger. I have always been staunch" (331). Narratively, Bogle's story comes to light as the result of an interview by Mrs. Touchet. She wants to know why Bogle, "the calm eye," aligns himself with the Claimant, concluding that "it was possible to 'know' Sir Roger was a fraud and yet still 'believe' Bogle" (229).
The tragedy of Bogle, and perhaps "the people" (at large), who are all led astray by a fraud, brings forth Smith's thesis, or really overarching question: "what can we know of other people?" This question heads a few chapters, and its answer remains elusive as she attempts to grasp hold of the truth (which in this novel is unattainable). Smith focuses this question most closely around the novel's third focal point: Mrs. Touchet and her relationships within the Ainsworth family. She is closest to William, who likes to remind those around him that his Jack Shepherd sold more than Dickens's Oliver Twist. While the novel mostly takes place in the 1870s, Mrs. Touchet shares glimpses of her younger self and William's younger self which juxtapose against their elder selves. In older age, William appears more stern, less jocular, and Eliza is more religiously pious. Throughout their young adult lives, they shared sexual love, but their bond survives and is predicated on their friendship. Their relationship is complex, messy, but it is strong, and it grounds Mrs. Touchet and her observations: if she knows anyone well, it is William.
Smith utilizes William and his social circle (consisting of Dickens, George Cruikshank, John Chapman, and Daniel Maclise among others) to tease out that even the great artists of the Victorian times were frauds in their own right. William tells Mrs. Touchet, "Poets are not always the gentlemen we imagine them to be. Although perhaps the same might be said of novelists" (374). Mrs. Touchet applies this sentiment to Dickens: "What was [William] meant to say? Spirits of the age sometimes leave their wives for actresses half their age? Spirits of the age have been known to bully their children and drop their friends? The people wanted the Dickens they had" (374). William himself struggles throughout the novel with the feeling that he is a fraud, which is only compounded by his feuds with Dickens, Cruikshank and even William Makepeace Thackeray who makes negative comments about William and his work. Smith does not delve deeply into the petty behavior of the various Victorian figures, but she does touch upon the quibbles they had amongst each other to illustrate how even the great artists of a time can fraudulently deceive a crowd.
Smith suggests that "people" ignore the desire to know the truth and "lie to themselves" so that they can have the author, political figure, or famous person they have romanticized. And yet, even in authentic pursuit of understanding, Bogle reminds the reader, "One lifetime was not enough to understand a people and the words they used and the way they thought and lived" (276). Language, which is fallible, is necessary to attempt to understand those around us. Mrs. Touchet considers, "the world is so much, and so various, and all the time - how can it be contained? Language?" (366). This is a meta-remark by Smith about the nature of novels, books which attempt to contain the various facets of life. Perhaps even this is the task of writers, to create stories which contain the world for the reader so that the reader can know it in all its plentiful variety and substantial diversity.
Smith ends her novel anachronistically with Mrs. Touchet mourning William's death, as "the only person who had ever really known her" (450). The real Mrs. Touchet passed in 1869, 13 years before William's passing in 1882. In a moment of blurry despair, Mrs. Touchet sees William's eyes open, gazing upon her as if he were "considering her for a character" (451). William's description, written on the page declares that "The mysteries of Mrs. Touchet were, finally, unfathomable," suggesting that William does not "really know" her.
Despite the novel ending with Mrs. Touchet's fright, Smith's pulse does lie within the "New Sincerity" movement. This movement rejects what fellow sincerity author David Foster Wallace described in Infinite Jest as the "hip cynical transcendence of sentiment," to instead embrace a more authentic and less ironic attitude. Famously, Wallace wrote, "How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words?" Smith writes similarly with Mrs. Touchet, who asks: "Who was she? . . .What would it be like to have a name for all these various peoples and urges within herself? But Mrs. Touchet was her name!" (439). She concludes these questions with her own name, and her musing continues, touching on the platonic. "All of our names are only temporary. . . only notations for something beyond imagining. They can give shape to matters too big to be seen, but never can they wholly describe the mystery" (439). Here lies a conviction that might initially seem lost in The Fraud's ending: you cannot fully know someone, and yet that signifies a greater value in knowing someone and not a meaningless endeavor in the attempt to know.
What can we know of other people? Do we know those around us or are they all frauds? Does it matter? Smith utilizes the novel's form to ask these questions. There is much merit in approaching these questions from angles of academic disciplines (like philosophy, sociology, linguistics), but perhaps what the novel allows Smith to do, and which the other disciplines can't quite do as well, is approach this question in a humane way. Smith shows through Mrs. Touchet the extent that someone can know another. Her inquiry into epistemology is grounded in the characters (who are, again, real historical figures). There are layers: the reader knows Mrs. Touchet, who knows the people around her, and who recreates them in her narrative. As Mrs. Touchet says, these people are "beyond imagining," but that does not mean they are any less real. Narratives, novels, and books are writers' attempts to "contain the world" through language, and these attempts give readers a foothold to know something of other people. Smith probes the nature of language, the possibility of knowing, with her novel, using fiction and its creative language to ascertain a sincere approach to finding truth through language and linguistics.
Smith's narrative approach in The Fraud is consistent with the types of questions asked in the book about language and its ability to represent the people and world around us. There are unexpected switches in point of view, sometimes without warning to the reader. Smith does not explain the Victorian figures she introduces. She does not describe the very real periodicals she name-drops. She does not contextualize William's feud with Dickens and Cruikshank. The novel's difficult style and seeming incoherency hammers down Smith's points about the incomprehensibility of truth. But this is where Smith's sincerity shines. Towards the end of the novel, Mrs. Touchet philosophizes about names and the signifier/signified relationship. She reconsiders Bogle, who is at this point in the story a good friend to her. She thinks that "In another life, [Bogle] would have suited her very well," presumably as a life companion or lover (439). "But we only get one life" (439). The realization Mrs. Touchet has about Bogle, whether sad or inspiring, reveals a sincere "truth" about the struggle to know the people around us: we have only one life to attempt to understand those around us.
Brody Eldridge graduated from Palm Beach Atlantic University with a BA in English. He is a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant award winner for the country of Georgia.
