The Autograph Man (Paperback)

It's not good. In fact, it's pretty bad. If you wanted a textbook example of the literary sophomore slump, here it is. The story concerns Alex-Li Tandem, a half-Chinese, half-Jewish (Tandem... get it?) dealer in autographs. The main plotline concerns his obsession with the fictitious old film star Kitty Alexander and with obtaining one of her ultra-rare autographs. The central theme, however, concerns Alex's inability to ever deal with the sudden death of his father. This death occurs in the excellent prologue, which forms the first tenth of the book and is really the only part worth reading. Covering Alex's childhood visit to a wrestling match at Albert Hall, complete with interesting digression into the venue's history, this section would have made an excellent standalone short story.

Alas, it is followed by 300+ pages of muddled prose populated by characters that are dreadfully flat and uninteresting. Alex is whiny loser, who is unable to connect with the people around him, seeking solace in the bottle, or in his obsession for autographs. He's not particularly likeable (not that this is a prerequisite of good fiction), but no matter how awfully he acts toward them, his friends and acquaintances (everyone he meets in the book, really), are incredibly (in the strictest sense of the word) tolerant and forgiving of him. The reader is given no glimpse whatsoever of what might make Alex worth having as a friend, much less the long-term boyfriend of one gorgeous woman and the occasional lover of another gorgeous woman. None of the supporting cast is written with any distinction, although there are momentary flashes of interest to be had from the legendary prostitute Honey Richardson, fellow autograph men Lovelear and Dove, and most of all, the thug turned milkman.

The story mostly follows Alex's attempt to locate Kitty Alexander, while a parallel story concerns the plans for some kind of Jewish mourning rite for his father. The first offers Smith the chance to try to make some points about celebrity. But this is never explored with any depth or from a new angle, and there are already scores of books which have done this much much better. The second plotline allows Smith to try and say something about religion, or more specifically Judaism. Again, she never commits to this thematic line with any seriousness, and the result is a mish-mash of Kabbalah, confusion over cultural identity, and semi-comic rabbis. Novels about Judaism are a dime a dozen, as are novels about the search for faith, and Smith has added nothing of interest to either realm. The result is a book that's shockingly dull, and written in an embarrassing self-consciously clever style which is rarely (if ever) as witty as Smith so painfully obviously intends it to be. This is an unfortunate work that reads as if Smith was locked in a windowless room, handed the merest shred of a premise, and then told she couldn't leave until she'd written 400 pages. As Alex-Li would say, "Ugh."

But on any reading it's just not that good. Where White Teeth was warm, Autograph Man is trying-to-be-cool but just ending up cold; where there was colour, now there is monochrome; where that was amiable, this is standoffish. The main characters are colourless and mostly ciphers for Smith's points-to-be-made on Judaism and celebrity. And most of the jokes had my toes curling all the way up to my spine ("Alex had read about dignified silences in novels. This was his first attempt." Stop trying so hard!!). It rises to Smith's unquestionable potential only in two places: the prologue, with its excellent digressive and funny narrative on Victoria and Albert and 1980s wrestling; and the third quarter of the book, set in America, where we meet the only interesting characters in Kitty Alexander and Honey Richardson.

Overall The Autograph Man - astonishingly and crushingly - seems like a step backwards from White Teeth, and not a flowering. Still, she's only 27 and has got her c**p book in early. Fingers crossed that it's all up, up and away from here.

What a disappointment then, to enter the heart of the book and come out the other side unfulfilled, disappointed and confused. Smith certainly reckons herself as a "wizard of prose" - as promised by the book's cover, but this really is an example of intellectual words being used for the sake of it. Intellectual words and phrases are an absolute joy when they form part of an enchanting and beguiling story. In the case of The Autograph Man Smith expects us not to see beyond the clever words, and therefore not to notice that the characters are unlikeable and the conversations between the unlikeable characters are unintelligible.

I am now making the "International Gesture for Boredom" - which started with the first page of the book, and ended when I threw it in the bin, three quarters of the way through.