Mobility and Refusal in 'NW'

Zadie Smith offers a look into the lives of some of the residence of the Garvey House, which is a tenement in northwest London. This housing project is the embodiment of a multicultural domesticity. While a tenement is usually considered to be a run-down and usually overcrowded place to live, Smith offers the characters mobility through a college education or by a desire to better their future, but she also offers them the right to decline such mobility, which, this decision alone, makes for a beautiful and humbling story.

Smith captured this contrast in desire in the scene in which Leah and Pauline are sitting on a park bench that Michel and Leah found in the middle of the road and brought home. Leah has her mind set on a future that greatly contrasts in Michel’s dreams of aspirations for a better future for him and his wife. Smith wrote:

“Perhaps she’s been a city fox too long. Every new arrival – the announcements seem to come now everyday – feels like a terrible betrayal. Why won’t everybody stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on” (85).

Growing up in the Garvey House, Leah has no desire to move, in both aspects: physically and economically. Michel is continually telling Leah that they need to move for their safety and for their economic growth. In his desire to move up socially and economically, he is involved in online currency trading, working with the only savings they have, “Leah’s only inheritance from Hanwell” saying, “Some days I lose, some days I win” (55).

All around her, everyone wants to take advantage of this mobility. Her childhood friend, Natalie, and her husband, Frank, have moved up in class and live in a beautiful home, with money to spare. While Leah went to college to have a better future, she is seemingly put off by its negative effects of hypocrisy and boredom.

Witnessing these negative effects in Natalie’s new life, she wants more for herself, emotionally. “Nat is the girl done good from their thousand-kid madhouse; done too good, maybe, to recall where she came from. To live like this you would have to forget everything that came before. How else could you manage,” she reflects on Natalie’s hypocrisies (70).

Leah desires to stop in moments of happiness and not rush life. The “new arrivals” that Leah is referring to are the babies being born in her close circle. She does not want children and just wants to enjoy life. Leah ultimately finds herself in conflicting thoughts of desiring to stay with Michel, but longing for a more emotional tie to life that keeps her moving in a different way than the other characters portrayed by Smith in NW.