Reflections on Identity

Our last several books have delved into questions of race, roots, identity, and how much control anyone really has over who they are. In Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, we meet a Native American boy struggling with the boundaries of his being - wanting to be both more in and more out. Rejected by his own people and other groups, he finds himself looking to carve out a new identity but being repeatedly drawn back into his own family and community by both triumphs and tragedies. The reality is, he is Native American and is inextricably tied emotionally to this community. His successes cannot be sweet without them and his failures are too much for him to bear alone. He is however, able to create an identity within these boundaries, and finding this balance infoms the narrative tension of the book. By the end, he is accepting those around them for who they are, not who he needs them to be, which happens to be what he has been seeking. The last scene of the book is a beautiful metaphor for this struggle, with which every person at some point grapples. Two of the main characters challenge each other to individually climb an impossibly high tree and find that, only with each other's support, is the climb ultimately possible. NW by Zadie Smith certainly tries to scratch the same itch, but from a very different angle. Here, the reader is dropped into the center of London's NW neighborhood, which, at least from the novel's perspective, is the city's melting pot. The story is told through three denizens of NW, two of which are close friends and the other a seeming stranger used to give the reader an extensive tour of the neighborhoods somewhat seedy characters. While there are many themes that Smith teases out with complex figures and plotlines, identity is shown to be a multi-layered meeting point of place, culture, and individuality. All of the central characters are looking to shed some of features that have long defined them, both good and bad. While Leah, for example, works to break free of her feminity, Natalie struggles with her race, family, and education; seeking sexual freedom as a substitute for control over her day to day life. In her attempt to run from her maternal routine and preppy lawyer identity, she collides with her poor, urban past in the form of an old friend, now living homeless in the neighborhood. Here, she must face the nature of identity: she cannot reject every element of her being and must be something. As her quest leads her down many roads, none seem to be in sync with the person that she thinks she is, even though much of her identity is linked to decisions that she ultimately made. This scene is truly the apex of the book, not only because of Natalie's various epiphanies, but also because of how much the reader gets to see of the neighborhood. The writing becomes so impelling, I literally felt that I was in motion with the pair, especially after they decide to smoke crack. Ultimately, the characters are trapped by their identities and in Felix's case, doomed. Smith's question then becomes not only where the gray area exists between the life we build and the one that we are born into, but if this struggle is the source of all of life's not only growth, but angst. As a sidenote, I recently read an interview with Zadie Smith where she said that she intended NW to be a book about female relationships, both familial and social. How do you think she expresses this, if at all?