Zadie Smith: The Autograph Man

By MARGIE THOMSON

As you might guess from the title, fame, emptiness and anonymity are big themes in this second novel by the prodigiously talented author of last year's publishing sensation, White Teeth.

But, while Autograph Man is recognisably by the same author - same sense of fun, same ferocious intellectual energy - there's a darker, denser side that will probably make it not everyone's cup of tea. Chinese-Jewish Alex-Li Tandem is our all-too-human hero who makes his living by trading autographs, real and forged, the ephemera of fame and desire.

He carries a large bag in which is filed the currency of his profession: signed photos of Elizabeth Taylor, Harrison Ford, Bette Davis et al. The amorality of this line of work is emphasised later in the novel when, at an "autographicana" conference in New York, Alex joins the queue to buy autographs from the two men who bombed Hiroshima, from leathery former bunny girls, and debates profiting from the signatures of Himmler and Hitler.

Alex trades at night on the internet, attends London auctions where he mixes with a cast of dissolute, stooge-like characters, and once a week writes, as he has done for 13 years (he's 27 now), to his idol, the (fictional) former screen goddess Kitty Alexander.

If she would write back, the resulting autograph would be worth maybe £3000 and plenty of status, as Alexander autographs are like hen's teeth in a market flooded with more common merchandise, such as "easy" Ginger Rogers.

When he began writing to Alexander he expressed the usual - "I am your greatest fan ... " - but soon gave up on that tack, and instead has been writing to her about herself. He has never received a reply.

However, on the morning we meet his adult self (we briefly met him as a 12-year-old in the book's prologue) he is emerging from a five-day drug bender in possession of a postcard on which is scrawled the signature of Kitty Alexander.

How and why did he get it? His friends believe he forged it, but Alex, naturally, doesn't think so. He comes to see it as a gift, and determines to hunt Alexander down when he's in New York.

Being in Alex's company over these 400-some pages is an odd, dissociating experience. He's often drunk or stoned and is subject to epiphanies (even one memorable one where he has "an epiphany about the importance of not having epiphanies") and flights of fancy that lead him down the road of lo-o-ong raves with his equally stoned friend Adam.

In many ways Alex is a hopeless case who floats outside the reality of his own life. He has a girlfriend of 10 years' standing, gorgeous, black Esther, but he's not treating her right.

"Alex was careless, in small ways, in the ways that count. His inability to remember the title of her PhD. The state of his bathroom. The books she recommended and he never read ... He was capable of thinking of her ... as a kind of wallpaper that he did not notice until a spotlight was thrown on it."

To that we might add his failure to visit her in hospital when she has her pace-maker replaced.

He is carelessly unfaithful , which leads one of his friends to utter a brilliant unmasking of the promiscuous and commitment-phobic: "All these women, they're all the same woman, really. Don't you see that? Kitty, Boot, Anita - they just overlap each other. Think of an art restorer peeling the paint off a portrait to find other portraits underneath. You ruin a perfectly good painting out of some misplaced curiosity - the possibility of other portraits. It's a kind of endless substitution - and all because you don't know how to deal with things as they are."

He exasperates his circle of lifelong, oddly matched friends who have little in common but their histories and their Jewishness, and even this is experienced unequally: one is now an aphorism-spouting rabbi ("In God's mind, no man says 'maybe"'); another a pothead who meditates for hours on pop-music trivia and sublime Judaic insights.

Alex himself, not surprisingly, is resistant to both God and Jewish ritual. "I don't feel anything," he eventually tells a rabbi.

And so it goes: a rambling, drunken quest-novel, a man in search of autographs, or rather the autograph that will fill the deep internal hole left when his father died.

He throws a lot of mind-bending substances into that hole, and mistakenly transfixes his yearning onto the nearest manifestation of the sublime that he can muster, those "small blips in the desire network, historical flotsam". Whether redemption is achieved, you'll have to read on to find out.

Suffice to say, however, the sense of spiritual confusion endures, albeit with altered nuances, right to the last page.

The extraordinary thing about White Teeth was that it appealed across the borders of age, gender and politics. It was enormously readable, witty, enjoyable, optimistic in its multiculturalism.

Some critics complained that despite its appeal, like an "engaging puppy", it wasn't a "good" novel: too long, too complicated, various weaknesses of character and a gag-serving plot, for instance.

Smith herself called it her "baggy monster" and declared her ambition to do better.

Autograph Man is indeed a little shorter, the plot easier to summarise. It is more complicated in its structure and its underlying seriousness. The exuberance of White Teeth is still here, but muted by the hugeness of the questions she raises, and by the psychological state of her main protagonist.

While I enjoyed it very much in some parts, at other times I felt Smith was indulging herself at the expense of my patience. It was like a string bag filled with delicious goods: the goods keep sticking out of the bag in awkward ways - as if Smith hadn't quite developed the storyline to successfully manage all the other elements, such as character and her themes.

It works well up to a certain point in Alex's New York trip, and then, once Kitty Alexander enters the picture in the flesh, so to speak, it descends into B-grade slapstick and unlikeliness, with Smith falling back on her enormous capacity for wit.

Personally, I'll be very curious to see where No 3 finds Smith: further down that dark, questing byway, or back on track with her vast fanbase, because I suspect a few may fall by the wayside with this. The Booker prize judges appear to agree. This week they omitted Smith's offering, which had begun as joint second favourite out of 20, from the six finalists.

* Hamish Hamilton, $34.95