From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story—and about who deserves to be believed. It is 1873. Mrs ...

At the center of The Fraud is a court case about the true identity of a man who claims to be a lost member of nobility and the allies and onlookers surrounding that scandal. Two characters anchor this study, Eliza Touchet who lives with a once-famous but now washed up writer and watches the trials, and Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved person from Jamaica who has become one of the main advocates for the claimant to the noble title. In those sections, Smith tells a shockingly relevant story to our age of misinformation and cult-like politics. It's astounding how many parallels there are to modern MAGA style movements. Similarly, Bogle's story from Jamaica to his travels around the world is well told and compelling. The issue we had with the novel is that none of this starts in earnest until more than halfway through the book. The first half of the novel is all about Eliza's life with the writer and his wife and his literary circle, exploring the bisexual affairs she had and how her writer rose and fall alongside the better and more famous writers of that time. While there are some interesting ideas about ethics and loyalty there, we all just felt like we didn't need so many pages of that description. Also, we had a lot of structural issues with that first section. Chapters are extremely short and scenes often extend through chapter breaks such that there doesn't seem to be any reason to separate them. At the same time, Smith doesn't follow a linear timeline and moves back and forth to different moments in Eliza's life with no warning and little cuing. All of this made the beginning of the novel long, confusing, and choppy. The conclusion of the novel also felt a bit unearned, with a monologue about racism and revolution from Bogle's son that didn't get a proper build up in the story. But Eliza's own arc, of realizing she had an inheritance from her dead husband to her choice of how to resolve it, led to a great debate in our club about how much Eliza was acting ethically as opposed to dodging problems. Overall, there are good things in The Fraud that are very present today, and we acknowledge that Smith did a great job with those elements, but we wish someone had edited this to a shorter and more concise novel on those topics.