A Frenzy of Renown

By James Poniewozik

Of the many subjects in Zadie Smith's second novel--Buddhism, Jewish mysticism, the Hollywood studio system--one that she presumably did not have to research was the bug-light allure of celebrity. In 2000, at age 24, she became deservedly famous for White Teeth, a sprawling, erudite comedy about culture clash and bioengineering in postcolonial Britain. Brilliant, young and beautiful, she became a favorite of the British media, which followed her love life and hairstyle changes with a fervor Americans reserve for cast members of Friends.

The hunger to get a piece of the famous and the psychology behind that desire are the substance of her intellectually agile but emotionally lacking follow-up, The Autograph Man (Random House; 347 pages). In it Alex-Li Tandem as a boy develops a fascination with celebrity signatures; in the poignant prologue, his father takes him to a wrestling match and drops dead of a brain tumor as Alex is jockeying to get a famous wrestler's autograph. Before dying, Alex's father gives him a signed pound note as a bet on the match, sealing the psycho-paternal importance of autographs for Alex. (To erase any doubt of that, the wrestler's handle is Big Daddy.)

Now in his 20s, Alex buys and sells autographs as his vocation. His avocations include drinking and drugging to the point of blackouts, cheating on his girlfriend and infuriating his friends, who have arranged for him to say Kaddish (the Jewish mourner's prayer) for his father, in the hope of bringing him closure and ending his self-destructive behavior. (Alex, as is typical ofSmith's melting-pot London, is half Chinese, half Jewish. We also meet black English Jews and an African-American Buddhist.) But Alex has a more pressing concern: finding Kitty Alexander, a reclusive, aging film star in New York City, whose rarely seen signature, the white whale of celebrity ephemera, he has pursued since childhood.

The Autograph Man is smaller than White Teeth in size and scope but not in themes. Religion, race, fame, death--Smith hits all the biggies here, and nearly every major character has a theory about at least one of them. Alex, for instance, is compiling a book that divides the world into people and things with "Jewish" traits (including poplar trees, Jimmy Stewart and John Lennon) and "goyish" traits (including oak trees, Elvis fans and the Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen). It's inspired by a Lenny Bruce riff, the novel's epigraph, but it becomes a predictable dog-people-vs.-cat-people dichotomy. In her narrative Smith acknowledges and dismisses the pop-psychological interpretations that Alex's book invites--"The Mixed-race people see things double theory and the fatherless children seek out restored symmetry [theory]"--but this is just a self-conscious cop-out. Likewise, Alex's best friend, Adam, is arranging his own collection of autographs into a cabalistic diagram meant to signify--well, we never learn what, but it obviously services Smith's theme of the power of names. It's a novelist's conceit or a conceptual artist's, not a convincing outgrowth of character.

Smith's narrative is like Adam's diagram: all the pieces seem to fit, but we never feel the animating emotion behind it. We know Alex is driven by unresolved grief and anger, but we don't feel it except at aremove, as when the inebriated hero scrawls out sardonic responses on a hotel feedback form. ("How did you find your sleeping arrangements? Lonely.") We know that Alex's search for Kitty is a spiritual quest because the titles of that section are taken from the Zen parable "Ten Bulls." Nice touch, but it would be better if we knew it because Smith managed to penetrate Alex's carapace of defensiveness.

The Autograph Man almost succeeds anyway, through the ecstatic inventiveness of Smith's prose. Her characters don't give thumbs-up; they make the "International Gesture for well-being." Like Martin Amis, she has sympathy for her comically debauched characters and mints turns of phrase the way the government mints pennies, as when Alex wanders into a bar "to have a drink, maybe drinks, maybe drinkseses." And she has a feel for the peculiarly male, geeky world of collectordom. But while she finds myriad arresting ways to say celebrity is a modern religion--"All fandom is a form of tunnel vision: warm and dark and infinite in one direction"--that doesn't make the idea less banal, nor does it obviate the need for emotional investment. At a climactic moment, facing his father's impending yahrzeit (the anniversary of his death), Alex still protests, "I don't feel anything." He could be speaking for us. The Autograph Man is ultimately an acrobatic but unmoving disquisition on an old question: What's in a name? The answer: not much, without an affecting story behind it.