The Autograph Man

By Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man is the second novel from Zadie Smith but unfortunately not half as good as the first one. Maybe I have no sense of humour but I did not find this novel funny at all. However, I have a feeling the author has had a lot of fun while writing it, somehow…

Alex-Li Tandem lives in the unremarkable London suburb of Mountjoy, where most of the novel takes place. Mountjoy is a fictional suburb in the flight path of an international airport at the northernmost tip of London. Alex-Li is 27, half-Jewish, half-Chinese, celebrity obsessed and makes his living collecting and selling autographs, and occasionally faking them - all to give the people a little piece of fame. For a very long time he has been seeking the autograph of Kitty Alexander, a reclusive 1950s B movie actress and whose autograph is particularly valuable because she gave it out so rarely. Every week for 13 years he has been writing to her, without a single reply, hoping she will send him his autograph.

Alex-Li’s best friends are a weed-smoking black Jew, Adam, born in America but living in London since childhood. His sister, Esther, is Alex-Li’s girlfriend. Rubinfine, boyhood pal turned rabbi and Joseph, the mysterious, oddly wise eternal nerd. He also mixed with a pack of low-level autograph dealers with whom he haunts an auction house and a nearby pub. In the evenings he gets high with Adam, who has discovered God through the combined powers of marijuana and the Kabbalah.

Miraculously, Alex comes into possession of one Kitty Alexander’s autographs, which prompts him to leave London and fly to Brooklyn, where Kitty lives. There he visits a large autograph collectors’ fair, Autographicana Fair, and hooks up with a bunch of suspicious characters, including an African-American woman with a germ phobia named Honey (who is best known for a celebrity blow job a few years ago…), and tries at last to meet his dream woman.