‘Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure’: Class Mobility and Public Transport in Zadie Smith’s NW

Abstract

In Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, NW (2012), characters are always on the move, taking buses, or missing buses, or talking to strangers on buses, getting off a stop too early to escape them. The novel’s emphasis on physical mobility is matched by Smith’s interest in figurative, social mobility. Everyone in NW is upwardly mobile in one way or another, and yet they are all, on some level, failing. These two forms of mobility intertwine—when, in one scene, Leah misquotes something Margaret Thatcher is supposed to have said about public transport: ‘Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure,’ as she and her mother take the bus from their home to Kilburn Station. Every ride in the book recalls this judgment: public transport comes to signify a refusal or an inability to buy into the upwardly aspirational values of Thatcherite Britain. NW grows out of a culture in crisis, and forces the reader to ask what has happened to the local amid a state-mandated form of late-capitalist individualism. I want to read NW through debates both current and historical about the public transport system in London, and listen hard for the kinds of conversations they replace, or invite. With its emphasis on urban circulation and the kind of confrontation the city (and especially public transport) generates, NW prompts readers to consider that in David Cameron’s Britain, as a direct result of 1980s Thatcherism and 1990s New Labour, too much attention is paid to how Londoners get around, and not enough to how they fail to get along together.

Keywords

• Zadie Smith
• London
• Margaret Thatcher
• politics
• the city
• public transport