‘A person is a bottomless thing’: Zadie Smith and glimpses of grace
Niv Lobo
Zadie Smith is one of my favourite living novelists. Her latest, The Fraud (2023), takes up the real-life Tichborne case, which captivated the British public in the 1860s-70s.
This historical setting allows Zadie to articulate all kinds of contemporary anxieties around truth in a post-truth world, and about the possibility of justice when a court case becomes a spectacle, or even a piece of theatre.