The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith
Last week I finished The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith and was pretty disappointed in it. It’s the first thing I’ve read by her, and I picked it up because I had heard such good things about White Teeth. Briefly, the book is about Alex-Li Tandem, an autograph collector and trader who is at rather loose ends on a number of fronts: his love life, his religion, his career, and his inability to cope with the loss of his father. To point, at the start of the book he has just awoken from a 3 day acid bender (which had been supposed to be part of an enlightenment ceremony) of which he remembers nothing, and discovers he has wrecked his car, that his girlfriend is angry with him, and that he may or may not have forged the holy grail of autographs, a signature from actress Kitty Alexander. Unfortunately, by the end of the book, very few of these issues are resolved, or even dealt with in any direct way, except for the most uninteresting of these–the Kitty Alexander autograph. There is much discussion of his Judaic faith, but it seems forced and out of place, especially since its importance to Alex is never made clear. His relationships are in no better shape at the end than they were at the beginning (while his girlfriend of 10 years is getting a new pacemaker installed he decides to go to an autograph show in New York–seemingly without consequence) and the ceremony he has at the end of the book to commemorate his father seems pointless and hollow, since Alex himself doesn’t believe in it.
There were enough moments of humor and keen observation here that I will eventually pick up White Teeth, but I would not recommend The Autograph Man.
