When Plot is Not the Point:
Zadie Smith's The Book of Other People

Admittedly, it was the cover-art that tempted me, that begged my hand to reach, to investigate the two columns and eight character sketches that lined either side of the front cover with a single strip of red down the center, giving it a Brady Bunch-esque vibe with something missing.  As it turns out, what was missing was the plot-line. The Book of Other People is just what the cover proposes: character sketches. All twenty-three stories in the collection follow editor Zadie Smith’s one simple instruction: “make somebody up.” While Smith, author of three novels herself, admits in her introduction that the book “is all about character,” I would go further and say that this collection is, as the title implies, really a book about people on more than one level.

To state the obvious, there are a lot of people, forty-six of them, really, including Smith herself. In addition to the twenty-three characters presented in various forms in The Book of Other People, the collection features an all-star cast of, yes, twenty-three contemporary writers, including Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close), and a few mug-shots of “J. Johnson” written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) and illustrated by Posy Simmonds. Refreshingly, Smith’s collection steps up to the plate and includes graphic novelists like C. Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, thus providing a welcome acknowledgement of the rise of graphic stories and affirmation of their value as an art form.

What the collection might lack in plot it makes up for in variety. While the stories all start in the same place, with just a name, the sketches in the novel range from characters that linger long after the page is turned to minimal, bare outlines. Some of the short pieces feel like a story fully realized in a manner of pages, and personal favorites among them include Edwidge Danticat’s “Lele,” Z.Z. Packer’s doomed “Gideon,” and Toby Litt’s sketch of a misanthropic monster.

“Each is its own thing entirely,” says Smith, “the book has no particular thesis or argument to make about fictional character.” But like any good reader, I am skeptical of an author/editor of a collection, an artist, who claims that her production is without specific agenda. While the anthology might not lay out a claim about fictional character, what it argues for is the value of the artist and of imagination, and moreover, the freedom to create not only people but worlds.

Ensuring this kind of artistic freedom is the fact that the collection is what Smith calls a “charity anthology,” meaning that the authors within submitted their pieces with no expectations of monetary reward, and were consequently free to design their pieces as they wished and not “to please the kind of people who pay [their] rent.”  All benefits from the book go to 826 NYC, a non-profit organization founded by Dave Eggers to facilitate and foster literacy and creativity in students between six and eighteen. As Zadie Smith puts it, “The Book of Other People represents real people making fictional people work for real people,” or in other words, real authors fighting with fiction to maintain a space for future creators and their creations.

--Savannah Stephenson