Profile: Zadie Smith

The new novel arrived fully-formed: Zadie Smith woke up one morning, and On Beauty was all there, in her head. She wanted to write a long marriage - she'd just got married herself, was curious what 30 years of it would be like - and she had a plot. When she described it to her new husband, poet and novelist Nick Laird, however, he pointed out she was simply rewriting Howards End. But she has never been afraid of tribute, and Forster was a "first love"; she had a couple of serious wobbles but this did not put her off.

In fact, she paid more tributes: to Nabokov, Elaine Scarry, Simon Schama; there's even a touch of Eminem's 8 Mile. But On Beauty is also a sustained attempt to enact ideas she's been mulling over for a few years: that the novel - writing a novel, reading a novel - is an ethical enterprise, a practice place for morals where we watch, in safety, people choosing what they must do, and what they lose when they choose wrongly; that it is the closest possible rehearsal for the real thing, which is the most important thing of all. "Good writing requires - demands - good being," she wrote a couple of years ago, introducing a collection of short stories, The Burned Children of America. "I'm absolutely adamant on this point."

This is an uncool, old-fashioned idea; in this, and in its determined engagement with tradition, with the canon, it runs counter to the multivalent, high-ironic, ultra-trendy playfulness casual readers of the novel that made her name, White Teeth, might expect. "In a way, the point of Zadie," says her friend the novelist Hari Kunzru, "is books. What the novel is for."

In an essay on Forster delivered as the 2003 Orange Word Lecture, then excerpted in this paper, Smith - who has been known to say, somewhat defensively, "I want to be a comic novelist. I always did ... My favourite writers are comic novelists" - sets the author of Howards End against Jane Austen in order to highlight what she sees as his particular, freeing innovation: "He allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics, but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life 'in'."

This open multiplicity is an article of faith - "we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good)" - and she has chased the idea through a series of essays she intends to gather into a book on ethics in the novel. She has, for example, applied it to Kafka, whom she casts as a kind of literary fundamentalist who stripped away "the communal, the shared, the necessary social. Other people," and who once declared, "I am literature."

The essay "glowed in the dark. It really contributed to an understanding of Kafka as a writer," says Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of New Republic, who was so impressed he put it on the cover. Smith herself considers that "writing a piece of criticism is just writing a beautiful thing as a partner to a beautiful thing. I'm not interested in tearing it apart - though I think those critics are essential, and it's important that people separate the good from the bad; I don't believe in relativist criticism. I want to write about greatness, not mediocreness. There's no point."

The planned book, which she hopes will be eligible as a PhD thesis that might enable her to return as a don to another first love, Cambridge University, is to include studies of Updike, Zora Neale Hurston, Sebald, possibly Roth, and definitely David Foster Wallace, who has been at the centre of an illuminating, ongoing tussle between her and another critic for New Republic, James Wood; a tussle which, just after 9/11, escalated briefly into what she now calls, with characteristic earthiness, a "bitchfight".

When White Teeth was published, in 2000, Wood placed it in a tradition he called "hysterical realism": books that contain so many other people, so much information, that it paradoxically drowns out their humanity. The novel has encountered a "crisis of character, and how to represent it in fiction," he argued, using DeLillo, Wolfe, Eggers, and Foster Wallace as examples. "Bright lights are taken as evidence of habitation," and "information has become the new character." 9/11, he added, gave hysterical realism a new irrelevance; it was time it died.

Smith, who's now friendly with Wood, agreed it was "a painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like White Teeth", but took issue with Wood's wish; with his understanding of "information"; and especially with his inclusion of Wallace. Perhaps it applied to his Infinite Jest, but "If anyone has recently learned a lesson about the particularities of human existence and their separation from social systems, it is Wallace." Moreover, Wood's arguments "lead with specious directness to an ancient wrestling match ... the inviolability of 'soul' versus the evils of self-consciousness and wise-assery, otherwise known as sophism" - ie, another sort of absolutism.

"I do think that for a much younger generation information has emotional content," she says now. "Certainly when I read Foster Wallace sometimes I'm moved to tears, but I think maybe that would be inaccessible to someone over 60. All they would see is the equivalent of logarithms in literature." Replying to Wood she concluded "it's all laughter in the dark - the title of a Nabokov novel and still the best term for the kind of writing I aspire to: not a division of head and heart, but the useful employment of both."

White Teeth takes Archie, 47, middle-aged, washed-up, just returned from the brink of suicide; Clara, 19, Jamaican ex-Jehovah's Witness; their daughter Irie; Archie's best friend Samad, a Bengali refugee, also married to a woman far younger, Alsana; and their twins, Millat and Majid, mixes them up in a tale of cloning, animal rights, race, Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, and rumours of the end of the world, and places them in Willesden, northwest London, where Smith grew up. Smith's father is English, a "working-class lad from East Croydon" who joined the army in May 1943, aged 17, and first saw action at Normandy. Archie (who works in direct mail, as Smith's father eventually did, after a brief spell as a photographer) first meets Samad in a tank in the second world war, but Smith did not know much about her father's experience when she wrote the book. She finally interrogated him for a newspaper piece in 2004; she discovered that he was injured at Normandy and that near the end of the war "he caught a senior Nazi. He helped liberate Belsen. In Germany, he was part of the reconstruction efforts." She gives an affectionate, slightly impatient portrait of a "sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things," who nevertheless displayed bravery in extremis.

She's good on fathers. The most, some might say the only, really moving section of The Autograph Man, her second novel, is the prologue, a simultaneously knockabout and tender portrait of a father and his 12-year-old son. And in On Beauty there's a short scene in which Howard, an aggressively liberal, sometime working-class English professor, goes back to see his father. Here she targets unerringly the difficulty of expressing love, especially when generations have been sundered by class, politics, education, or simply growing up.

Smith's mother emigrated from Jamaica as a 15-year-old. She modelled briefly, was a secretary, did "youth and community studies" at Brunel, and is now an NHS psychotherapist and a consultant to parents for the charity Young Minds. She's a "very grand woman, Yvonne," says Kunzru, "a big personality". After the publication of White Teeth Smith was put up in a beautiful oceanfront hotel in Jamaica, and says she found the experience "obscene": "my family are living 20 to a hut in the middle of the island. I don't find it relaxing."

In a 2003 piece for the New York Times she used an old family photograph to explain what Christmas was like when she was five: "I did, or overdid, the decorations ... my dad has the let's-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage" (her parents divorced seven years later); there is an invisible younger brother, Ben (another, Luke, was as yet unborn); a Jamaican uncle. Both brothers, under the monikers Doc Brown and Luc Skyz, rap, and are thanked for their expert help in On Beauty, in which a hip-hop-obsessed younger brother plays a major part. "Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream," she observed. "It is of course Family (messy, complex, miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) which is the real gift. Family is the daily miracle." In her introduction to The Burned Children of America Smith quotes Jonathan Safran Foer - "familial communication always has to do with failures to communicate"; "I think," says Simon Prosser, her editor at Hamish Hamilton, "she writes family scenes better than anyone else I can think of."

In a section of White Teeth that attracted some slightly shocked, disapproving comment, Smith ruthlessly mocked an upper-middle-class liberal family, the Chalfens. It is overdone, cartoonish in places, but what is hard to miss is its anger and envy, channelled through Irie. "I think when I was growing up I was very very aware of not being middle-class; much more aware than of being black as an unusual thing. I never wanted to be white, but I always wanted to be middle-class. I liked the big house, I liked the piano, I liked the cats, the cello lessons." It's a subject she returns to, in a more nuanced way, in On Beauty: Howard Belsey, an untenured professor at an East Coast liberal arts college, is white, and English, married to Kiki, a black woman from Florida; his academic enemy is Monty Kipps, a black British man married to a Caribbean woman - but also celebrated, and titled. Setting it in America means race can be discussed in a more open, different way than it can be in Britain, but again, class trumps everything. A poor black rapper called Carl is treated well but condescended to, and rebuffed the minute he assumes equality. "You people aren't even 'black' anymore, man - I don't know what you are," he says, in hurt. The answer is middle-class.

On the other hand, says Smith, although "I didn't come from a background where there was any sense of entitlement, there was no sense of limit. My mother's the sort of person who if I said to her I think I want to grow up to be a jockey, she'd be like 'Great. Fine.'" Zadie Smith progressed, she says, pretty normally through a "normal" school, Hampstead Comprehensive in Cricklewood, a big, extremely mixed school in London, part of a "close-knit" group with whom she is still friends. In her spare time she tapdanced, for 11 years; and she read. "It is a mixture of perversity and stomach-sadness that makes a young person fashion a cocoon of other people's words," she wrote in her introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2003. "If the sun was out, I stayed in; if there was a barbecue, I was in the library; while the rest of my generation embraced the sociality of Ecstacy, I was encased in marijuana, the drug of the solitary ... I wrote straight pastiche: Agatha Christie stories, Wodehouse vignettes, Plath poems - all signed by their putative authors and kept in a drawer. I spent my last free summer before college reading, among other things, Journal of the Plague Year, Middlemarch, and the Old Testament. By the time I arrived at college I had been in no countries, had no jobs, participated in no political groups, had no lovers ... In short, I was perfectly equipped to write the kind of fiction I did write: saturated by other books; touched by the world, but only vicariously. Welcome to the house that books built: wallpapered with other people's words, through which one moves like a tourist through an English country manor - somewhat impressed, but uncertain whether anybody really lives there."

"Cambridge was a joy," says Smith now. "Tediously. People reading books in a posh place. It was my fantasy. I loved it. I miss it still." And, elsewhere, "I was pretty much the only black girl. So I was something of exotic interest, in the same way that I found public schoolboys incredibly exotic, because I'd never seen anybody like that. So, you know, you get laid a lot. That's one advantage ... I took out three student loans and lived the life of Riley."

She worked hard too, and wrote more fiction; in her second year she published a story in an annual Oxbridge creative writing collection called the May Anthologies; she met Laird, who edited her, at the launch party; they became friends. Another friend was Josh Appignanesi, now a documentary filmmaker; he showed Zadie's work to his mother, the novelist Lisa Appignanesi, who says, "It was quite clear Zadie was going to write, and write extremely well." She remembers a "bubbly, energetic, rather wonderful young woman" who had a "histrionic side", but was much loved by the Appignanesi family for her enthusiasm, her eagerness for life. And "she's a wonderful blues singer. Zadie at a party singing or being hostess in a bar is quite something."

The May Anthologies story attracted the attention of at least one publisher, but Appignanesi cautioned Smith not to jump too fast, that she needed an agent, because "You need to live" - and introduced her to Salman Rushdie, who suggested the Wylie agency. In their third year Laird and Smith entered work for a literary prize: he won, and about a month later, having written about 100 pages of what would become White Teeth as well as studying for her finals, she signed a contract for a reported £250,000. Both got firsts.

That was news enough; the fact that White Teeth was also not bad sent commentators into adjectival tizzies. "Quirky, sassy, wise ... reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ... will surely rank as one of her generation's most precocious debuts ... extremely funny ... witty and fresh with authenticity." There were a few dissenting voices, one of which, famously, was Smith's own, in the now-defunct literary magazine Butterfly; a year later, in the Guardian, she criticised it again: "unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault." It has sold over a million copies.

"Quite a lot of writers of her generation," says Simon Prosser, "reject the work of people like Amis, McEwan, or Barnes, Rushdie; Zadie doesn't. She has a lot of respect for that generation. In some ways she has taken their project - the comic brilliance of Amis, the seriousness of McEwan, the playfulness of some of Barnes's work, the concern with ordinary Englishness - and moved it on, made it fresh. I think of her as an incredibly British writer - and the Britishness that she embodies, both as a writer and as a person, is a very real form of Britishness, which is multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural."

But in its blithe jumbling of colours and creeds White Teeth also did something new among books about minority experience, says Kunzru; she wrote "about being already here. She did it very easily and naturally." It was, for once, a comparatively cheery vision, and the chattering classes descended on it in noisy relief, calling her "the George Eliot of multiculturalism", "the Lauryn Hill of London Literature", literature's "great black hope".

This praise is, of course, double-edged: it is tinged with the kind of liberal condescension, well-meaning, perhaps, but somewhat racist also, that she skewered in White Teeth; and it required her to be an icon far larger than her 24-year-old self, asked to commentate on, represent, be the acceptable face of multicultural Britain. Combined with the fact that she is a woman - which Smith has always felt is more of a challenge than race or class - it was too much.

Late in The Autograph Man (2002), which is about the empty, corroding nature of fame, Alex-Li, the autograph man of the title, acquires the rare signature of a reclusive star and sells it, successfully, at auction; he is suddenly, in his world, famous, and realises that he feels "a new order of fraudulence. He was not only not the person they thought he was (rich, lucky, shrewd), he was not the person he thought he was either (useless, damaged, doomed)." By the time the book was published, coinciding with a Channel 4 dramatisation of White Teeth, Smith had begun to learn yet another aspect of fame: "Groupies hate musicians. Moviegoers hate movie stars. Autograph men hate celebrities. We love our gods. But we do not love our subjection." Envy, bitchiness, backlash. And far more mixed reviews, this time, for a book that is cerebral, tricksy, written in the self-conscious-making glare of publicity, and darkened by the fact that her father was seriously ill. "I think [the reviews were] very demoralising for her," says Appignanesi.

We meet in a restaurant in Willesden, where, Smith says, she can "walk down these streets and know everybody. They know my mum, and they know my brothers, and they knew my dad [who now lives in Felixstowe], and my brother works in the school here [for an educational charity for child refugees]. It's home to me." She lives at the other end of the street she grew up in, the same street as her mother, and it obviously gives her stability. She's confident, fierce, impatient; animated, especially when discussing books, her props a tube of lip-gloss and a succession of quickly smoked roll-ups; yet this co-exists with what Laird calls, in his Forward and Guardian First Book Award-nominated collection of poems, To A Fault, a face "closed to the public". Her instinct for self-preservation, combined with a characteristic wish to perform well, creates a slightly destabilising passive aggression - "Did I give you a wholly informative and sparkly interview? You know I did. I'm sorry, I'm not very sparkly ... " which can rub interviewers up the wrong way.

"In private," says Prosser, an encounter with Smith "is rather like an encounter with her writing. She's terrific company. She's generous, spirited, open-natured, curious, supportive, fun. A really good friend, and a great adviser to me on all sorts of things." Kunzru also treasures the fact that she's "a great person to talk about writing with - she's very passionate in her opinions. We end up waving forks at each other across the dinner table. It's a joy. People think of her as trendy, but I think almost the opposite is true - I think of her as a bluestocking."

And she is, says Appignanesi, "very beautiful to look at. That's changed. She wasn't always. She has worked at turning herself into this beautiful young woman. I see that as another tribute to her, a kind of overcoming. The will to transform things - she can transform base matter to make literature, she has transformed herself." It's a subject Smith has been hurt by in the past, seeing discussion of hair and clothes as just another way in which women are belittled - and yet, says Kunzru, "Zadie does turn up in public looking fabulous." She knows a 'worrying amount' about old Hollywood, and I think the pleasure she takes out of being a public novelist is being able to play a movie star. It's a piece of fun." She's an "odd contradiction between privacy and flamboyance," and has, he thinks, "become a phenomenon despite herself".

"I refuse do any television and I won't do anything which makes my life un-normal," says Smith. "But it's amazing! Do you want to go on a dating programme, do you want to stand on your head in the park? It's constant. But I won't go on the front cover of a magazine. I won't do any of it. I have my life, and I don't care how many people try and stop me from having it. The other day I was having lunch here, and this man just stared and stared and stared and stared and stared, and finally I just said to him, 'Just stop now. I'm eating.' I won't be made a freak! And if I have to leave the country every time a book comes out to keep my life normal, I will."

And she did leave, immediately after publishing The Autograph Man, for America, which already had a strong hold on her imagination; critics noticed a tendency in that book to channel the whimsy of Eggers's magazine McSweeney's. "That will always be me - I'm so easily influenced. I read somebody, and then I just write their book again. But it's all learning. If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time. But the freedom that reading American writers gave me I don't regret at all. Particularly when writing a first-person essay I'm not all bunched up - I don't have to write this perfect formal essay. I can say what I think, and what I believe. And I didn't know that from English writing, apart from maybe Woolf, but even then it's so elaborately styled."

At Harvard she taught creative writing, and a course on ethics in the novel, in which she paired a writer with a philosopher - say Kafka and Kierkegaard - followed by a living writer - Alexander Hemon, or Eggers, or Nick Hornby - doing a reading. At first she was lonely (she and Laird had got together when she was 25, but he had remained in London, working as a lawyer; halfway through her year in America he quit to work on his poetry, and a novel, and join her) and she would go out for dinner with the writers afterwards, discovering, to her glee, that writers are "so like their books. And that really blew me away. It also released my criticism because you realise that it's the full man who's writing. The faults he makes in his prose are often the faults he makes in his life. The same is true for me - it's something you learn from practising, rather than being a critic."

And there were other sudden freedoms, and changes. For someone who had always lived in London, Smith found East Coast weather extreme, and unignorable. "Suddenly there was place. Real place. Not just shops and corner shop owners and buses. But place, and that was fantastic." Although she was still wedded to the idea of writing 19th-century, English, realist novels she began attempting short stories, finding that "You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages."

Contentment in her marriage - "she seems incredibly happy - he does too, actually, they both seem very very centred by the experience of being married to one another," says Kunzru - and increased confidence have given a greater maturity, a joyfulness, to On Beauty. And they have given it a compulsively readable sense of personal danger, of how fragile things - family, love, trust - are, how easy to break. But she also knows the other fragile thing for a writer is the self, which is so much, in Ian McEwan's phrase, "on the line and in use", especially if so much learning is being done in the public eye: "I've just got nothing left ... I'm done. I'm knackered. I want to have a life which isn't a literary life. So I think a natural break of several years, more than several, is what's called for. Completely." She's contemplating another escape from the country.

When the Booker longlist was announced a few weeks ago, Smith, having just finished On Beauty, was by a pool in Ibiza. Her mother called, "and she was reading bits of newspapers out to me - and I was being described as this established, status quo novelist! In what kind of culture does three novels make you ... it's absurd! This is a lifetime's work, and I'm an apprentice! Coetzee is an author. I'm a beginner."

Life at a glance

Born: October 25 1975, London.
Educated: Hampstead Comprehensive, Cricklewood; King's College, Cambridge.
Married: 2004 Nick Laird.
Books: 2000 White Teeth; '02 The Autograph Man.
Awards: Whitbread First Novel Award; Guardian First Book Award; James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction; Commonwealth Writers' First Book Award; Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize; Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature.

· On Beauty by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton, price £16.99