By: Zadie Smith

Paperback

Click on the Google Preview image above to read some pages of this book!

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. He hunts for them, collects them, sells them, occasionally fakes them – all to give the people what they want – a little piece of Fame. An existential tour around the hollow things of modernity – celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. Unlike his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold.

About The Author

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975, and continues to live in the area. White Teeth is her first novel and has won awards for Best Book and Best Female Newcomer at the BT Emma Awards (Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards), the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Prize for a first novel in 2000, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction 2000, the WH Smith Book Award for New Talent, the Frankfurt eBook Award for Best Fiction Work Originally Published in 2000 and both the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award and Overall Commonwealth Writers Prize.

He has the ability to imagine himself a minor incident in the lives of others. It is not an abstract thing. Alex-Li Tandem would not know quite what you meant by 'abstract'—he is twelve. He simply knows that if he imagines swimming in the sea, well, while most children will think immediately of the cinematic shark below them, Alex, in his mind, is with the lifeguard. He can see himself as that smudge on the horizon, his head mistaken for a bobbing buoy, his wild arms hidden by the roll of the surf. He can see the lifeguard, a bronzed and languid American, standing on the sand with his arms folded, deciding there's nothing out there. Alex sees the lifeguard wander off down the beach in search of those half-bare German girls from yesterday and a cold drink. The lifeguard buys a Coke from a passing vendor. The shark severs Alex's right calf from his body. The lifeguard sidles up to Tanya, the pretty one. The shark drags Alex in a bloody semicircle through the water. The lifeguard speaks kindly to her ugly friend with the flat chest, hoping for brownie points. Some vertebrae snap. Did you see that? A seal! says Tanya, mistaking Alex's desperate hand for the turn of a glossy flipper. And then he's gone. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a seal? No, it's me, drowning. This is how things go for Alex-Li. He deals in a shorthand of experience. The TV version. He is one of this generation who watch themselves.

YHWH

Just now, he is in his father's car, on a day trip. Overhead flies a plane, so low it looks as if it might worry the corrugated roofs of an industrial estate to the left. They are on a minor A-road, in congestion, near an airport. To his right sits his father, Li-Jin, who is also his best-friend. From the back seats two boys flick an elastic band at his head for no reason. Now he leans forward out of their reach and puts his fleshy arm out of the passenger window—can he really be seen from up there? Hello! The anorexic February trees stretch towards him on either side. In return he offers an open hand to let the wind shuttle through his fingers. He catches a slick leaf round his thumb like a bandage. Ug ug. Uggarama. They are going to see a wrestling match. This is unusual. Alex is not a very social fellow. His spare time is spent either in front of the TV or accompanying his father to his surgery. He is perfectly content to skulk around the reception area speculating on who has what while Dr Tandem does whatever he does in the small room with the white door. Alex will take with him a book of crossword puzzles or a comic and is always left alone, which is the way he likes it. Foot-fungus, angina, the plague: he assigns these diseases willy-nilly to the simply bronchial or menopausal as they slump in the child-sized plastic chairs. No one ever notices him. He's just a boy, watching. It is like a TV show. Only in the past year he has become conspicuous. He has grown and filled, he's now soft-bellied, woman-hipped and sallow. His new glasses magnify the crescents of his eyes—does he look more Chinese? His boyhood is falling away. People have started to fuss with him. Constantly he is being grabbed by the shoulder and asked idiotic questions by the elderly. If you are twelve, suddenly everyone has an opinion about you and the open air, and you and a good football game, and you versus the sporty, red-cheeked boys of some godforsaken distant era. The consensus is that he should get out more. Alex has sensed that some kind of day trip, if not this particular day trip, was inevitable.

A conversation between his parents, which he was not privy to, occurred three nights earlier, as Alex slept in a next-door room, at the very edge of his bed, dreaming of cliffs and water. His mother, Sarah, sleepily lifted herself up on one elbow, waited for the drone of a plane to pass them by and then said, 'Li, you know, maybe on Saturday we could just do something different with Al, instead of, you know, this silly moping around you all the time—I mean, not that...' And this fading sentence concealed an old antagonism between them, for there has not always been enough space for Sarah in this adoring duo of father and son. Now that he is twelve, his mother would like to see Alex, as she puts it, 'Going up to the world, going into it, and, you know, sort of engaging it, getting that vital interplay...'

Li-Jin opens his eyes and groans. What is it she's reading these days that makes her speak to him like a self-help book in the middle of the night? His head hurts. It's 2 a.m. By now he should be stamping down the corridor in his underwear, yelling, heading for the guest bedroom. That used to be the routine. But he doesn't have time for all that any more. Marital rows, street riots, bar-room brawls—these seem to him now to be the great luxuries of modern life. You need time for that stuff, for the fighting, for the making up. Although he has told no one, Li-Jin has lost this luxury. He can't risk the escalation. He simply doesn't have the time. And he has been surprised to discover that when you subtract the rows what you are left with is love, a huge amount of it, leaking out of you. Now he plumps a pillow and moves closer to his wife, signifying agreement. It is a sort of gift. But wait, there's more: he kisses her fingertips and puts his throbbing head in her hands.

ISBN: 9780143566519
ISBN-10: 0143566512
Series: Popular Penguins
Audience: General
Format: Paperback
Language: English
Number Of Pages: 432
Published: 29th August 2011
Dimensions (cm): 18.1 x 11.0
Weight (kg): 18.0