Queen of her Craft

In The Fraud, Zadie Smith's first swipe at historical fiction, old strengths and new prowess join hands to delightful fruition

- Aditya Mani Jha

Writing a believable, engaging work of historical fiction is difficult enough. Writing one that also works as an allegory for modern times is threading the needle, really. Look at Arthur Miller’s classic play The Crucible, for example. Structured as a fictionalization of the late 17th

century Salem witch trials, this 1953 play also worked as a scathing commentary on one of the biggest American issues of that decade, McCarthyism i.e., the American government’s persecution of individuals suspected to be Communists. Zadie Smith’s new novel The Fraud pulls off a similar tightrope act. While it follows a small set of English characters in the 1860s (and their reactions to a widely publicized legal case pertaining to fraud/ identity theft), Smith’s allegorical skills make it clear that she’s also talking about the ‘shadowy elites vs the common man’ framing of Trump-era politics.