Leave it to Zadie Smith to include a political Rorschach test in her latest novel. In one of The Fraud’s pivotal encounters, set in 1875, the novel’s protagonist, Eliza Touchet—Scottish housekeeper, abolitionist, aspiring novelist and former lover of the English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth—has just come back from a visit to the Hackney Downs riots, where thousands upon thousands pulled down fences enclosing what had once been land held in common. Frazzled, she breathlessly recounts all she’s seen to Henry Bogle—a young black man who has relocated to England to support his father—and congratulates herself on her progressive notions. After she speaks, Smith’s narration shifts to Henry’s perspective: “It was not her political ideas or the lack of them that were of interest to Henry. It was her freedom. Her freedom of movement.”
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