The geography of London plays a large role in Zadie Smith’s NW, with NW being the postcode for Northwest London, where much of the novel takes place. The novel is also full of street names and other landmarks, many of which inspire the names of titles or chapters in the book. In some ways, the scope of the novel is limited, focusing on a single part of a single city, but this small area also contains a wide variety of characters who lead very different lives, ranging from a wealthy heir like Frank to a squatter like Shar who has to run schemes to survive. Despite their physical proximity, these characters often put up boundaries that keep them away from each other, and these boundaries are often based on race and class. Caldwell, for example, is full of low-income residents, and it has a fence around it that separates it from the rest of the city, particularly the old Victorian mansions where wealthy people live, which are just a short walk away. The people in Northwest London further separate themselves by going to different schools, grocery stores, and churches. All these boundaries are reflected in the structure of the novel itself, which jumps between different perspectives of characters who seem at first only loosely related.
Still, despite all the economic, racial, and social boundaries that separate them, the people of Northwest London can’t help being connected to one another due to their shared geography. The structure of the novel reflects this as well, with a few key moments where different plotlines intersect. The most important incident in the story is when Felix is stabbed to death on Albert Street, just one street away from where Leah lives with Michel. Even Natalie, who has largely left her impoverished past life behind, gets drawn into the stabbing, reconnecting up with Nathan, an old school acquaintance who seems to have some involvement with the stabbing. The purpose of these boundaries seems to be to isolate wealthy Londoners from violence and other negative effects of life in poverty, but the novel makes it clear that, as much as the wealthy attempt to live in their own privileged world, they ultimately cannot escape the shared human experience of modern urban living, where everyone’s life is connected.
Geography and Human Connection ThemeTracker
Geography and Human Connection Quotes in NW
The fat sun stalls by the phone masts. Anti-climb paint turns sulphurous on school gates and lampposts. In Willesden people go barefoot, the streets turn European, there is a mania for eating outside. She keeps to the shade. Redheaded. On the radio: I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Look up. A jolting form of time travel, moving in two directions: imposing the child on this man, this man on the child. One familiar, one unknown. The afro of the man is uneven and has a tiny gray feather in it. The clothes are ragged. One big toe thrusts through the crumby rubber of an ancient red stripe Nike Air. The face is far older that it should be, even given the nasty way time has with human materials. He has an odd patch of white skin on his neck. Yet the line of beauty has not been entirely broken.
The boy is a boy and Michel is a man but they look the same age.
— He was murdered! Why does it matter where he grew up?
Sounds reasonable but she can’t take it reasonably. She is enraged by the possibility that he does not believe her. This is the girl! Don’t you believe me? That’s an insane coincidence! Her photos are in my envelope!
Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.
“And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.
“You’re dreamin’,” he said.
“You rose up with these red pigtails in your hand. You dragged her up. You were the only one saw she was in trouble.”
It was not that Ms. Blake hadn’t noticed the white people walking around with the climbing equipment, or the white people huddled in stairwells discussing the best method to chain themselves to an oak tree. She had experienced her usual anthropological curiosity with regard to these matters. But she had thought it was more of an aesthetic than a protest.
“I wish we could have talked more often.”
“Everyone loves a bredrin when he’s ten. After that he’s a problem. Can’t stay ten always.”
Here nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do. She could see the act perfectly clearly, it appeared before her like an object in her hand—and then the wind shook the trees once more and her feet touched the pavement. The act remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible. Someone would surely soon come to this bridge and claim it, both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built. But right at this moment there was no one left to do it.
On a tatty sofa a Rastafarian gentleman sat holding a picture of his adult son.
“You, me, all of us. Why that girl and not us. Why that poor bastard on Albert Road. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.