Zadie Smith's London

Here we are, in the wake of hurricane Sandy, getting fresh insights into the horror of lives inside housing projects in New York City (damp, cold, powerless, dangerous, and overally under the totalitarian thumb of an insensitive government), and there in her new novel NW, British writer Zadie Smith gives us a glimpse of such lives in contemporary London. 

NW is literally the postal code for the most impoverished part of northwest London. The characters of the novel are all raised in a housing project named "Caldwell" in NW, and the narrative unfolds through the eyes of these characters.

According to the NYT, NW is not only reflective of the cultural and social realities of a rapidly hybridizing London, but also of a "modernist anxiety" about time:

The language embodies this anxiety, says the Times--an anxiety about one thing following another, about the ticking of the clock, and the (unnerving) way time leads us toward death.

Leah, one of the characters, who is particularly engrossed in deciphering the mystery behind this linear march of time into the abyss, has a moment of epiphany aboard a bus one day.

Sitting on the bus she stares at an Indian woman’s bindi until she finds she “has entered the dot, passing through it, emerging into a more gentle universe, parallel to our own, where people are fully and intimately known to each other and there is no time or death or fear.”