The Autograph Man Book

“Intelligent. . . . Exquisitely clever. . . . An ironic commentary about fame, mortality, and the triumph of image over reality.” —The Boston Globe

The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s discussion of The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith’s remarkable novel about life, death, and the search for the ultimate signature.

Book Magazine

If The Autograph Man were Zadie Smith's first novel, it would likely win praise for being smart, funny and provocative, though perhaps overly familiar in its selection of subject—the commodification of celebrity. Smith's tale of an autograph dealer named Alex-Li Tandem and his quest for the holy grail of signatures is both a breezy read and an ironic allegory on how celebrity has become a religion. Yet in comparison with Smith's 2000 debut novel, White Teeth, the multicultural, multigenerational epic that made such a deserved splash, her follow-up feels slight. If the order were reversed, The Autograph Man would be promising, and White Teeth would be a promise fulfilled. Even so, you couldn't flip-flop the thematic progression, because it was White Teeth that turned Smith into a literary supernova, and The Autograph Man is her meditation on that fame.

As grist for the journalistic mill, Smith arrived practically made to order: young (twenty-one when she wrote her first novel; twenty-four when it was published), gifted and multiracial, photogenic and outspoken. Reviews almost invariably compared her with Salman Rushdie (who loved White Teeth), as if any "outsider" author exploring London's ethnicities were a member of the same exotic tribe.

As in her first novel, Smith's panoply of indelibly crafted characters shows her ear for diverse dialect and her eye for the telling detail. The book invokes a litany of cross-cultural references that extend from religious mysticism (the novel's first half is framed as Lenny Bruce inspired commentary on the Jewish Kabbalah; the second half deals in pop Zen) to one-liner takeoffs on Allen Ginsberg and Vladimir Nabokov. Thoughfolk poet Leonard Cohen plays a minor but pivotal role, the touchstone the novel recalls most strongly—whether consciously or not—is Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a book that similarly examines the existential malaise through a protagonist's tunnel-vision obsession.

"You watch too many films is one of the great modern sentences," writes Smith. "It has in it a hint of understanding regarding what we were before and what we have become. Of few people has it been more true than Alex-Li Tandem, Autograph Man extraordinaire."

Smith's protagonist is a twenty-seven-year-old London suburbanite who carries a business card that reads "Tandem Autographs: More Stars than the Solar System." Though he is the son of a Chinese surgeon who died young and a Jewish mother, Alex is Smith's English Everyman, his ethnicity more matter-of-fact than life-defining. It's no big thematic issue, for instance, that one of Alex's best friends (and the brother of his girlfriend) is "black as peat," or that another has become a wisecracking rabbi. In Smith's fictional world, the purebred WASP is the dinosaur of stereotypes.

Beyond a series of fairly static set pieces, from the philosophic to the slapstick, what little narrative momentum there is concerns Alex's pursuit of a rare autograph from a reclusive and fading film star, his relationship with his girlfriend as she recovers from a car accident that happened when Alex was driving while on hallucinogens and the attempts by a group of rabbis to have him mourn his dead father with the traditional Jewish Kaddish (his father wasn't Jewish, and Alex doesn't practice). It's no surprise that the novel fails to tie such disparate strands together, for Smith is less concerned with what Alex does than with what he thinks. And what he ponders incessantly is the pursuit of the celebrity autograph.

"Autograph collecting, as Alex is not the first to observe, shares much with woman-chasing and God-fearing," writes Smith. "A woman who gives up her treasure with too much frequency is not coveted by men. Likewise a god who makes himself manifest and his laws obvious—such a god is not popular. Likewise a Ginger Rogers is not worth as much as one might imagine. This is because she signed everything she could get her hands on. She was easy. She was whorish. She gave what she had too freely. And now she is common, in the purest meaning of that word. Her value is judged accordingly."

Thus, Alex chooses to worship his inscrutable god in the form of the obscure American actress Kitty Alexander, whose signature would be worth thousands of dollars if only she ever deigned to sign. His pilgrimage eventually takes him to New York, where he teams up with a former celebrity prostitute named Honey Smith (whose notoriety echoes the Divine Brown Hugh Grant incident and whose name suggests that of a certain novelist), who has become an autograph hound. She has a heart of gold and a germ phobia, though hating to be touched must have been a hazard in her previous occupation.

Alex has long recognized that "autographs are a small blip in the desire network." But what happens when he finds his every desire fulfilled? After spending his life feeding off celebrity, Alex becomes one, if only briefly and by association. From the other side of fame's great divide, he confirms what he had long suspected: "Groupies hate musicians. Moviegoers hate movie stars. Autograph Men hate celebrities. We love our gods. But we do not love our subjection."

In comparison with the deeper, broader truths of White Teeth, which turned Smith into a brand-name commodity, the author risks belaboring the obvious in her musings on celebrity and the ambivalence it elicits. It's as if White Teeth were such an all-encompassing triumph that she didn't want to risk repeating herself with a second novel of similar scope and scale. Smith remains a virtuosic master of voices, a stylist who can be both playful and profound, but here's hoping that the aftermath of her sophomore effort provides richer fodder for novel number three.