The Fraud, a Victorian novel for the post-Trump era, is elegant, flawed, and sharp as a knife.
Midway through Zadie Smith’s elegant new novel The Fraud, Smith offers us a striking description. She’s writing about the man at the center of a court case, currently appearing before a crowd at a rally being held in his name.
“One saw at once that here was a man who moved as the wind moved,” Smith writes, in the cool, gently judgmental prose that characterizes The Fraud. “A man with no centre, who might be nudged in any direction, depending. The watery eyes plainly revealed he was out of his depth. But then, too, that he enjoyed this crowd and was willing to believe in their belief if they after all felt so strongly. … In fact, if it came to that, he did believe! In fact, it was an outrage that anyone could doubt him! And yet: what if they found him out?”
The paragraph is the most precise and most damning portrait of Donald Trump’s psyche that I have yet read: the hollowness, the complacency, the knowledge of one’s own inadequacy that is too frightening to ever be looked at in the light of day. It is not, however, officially about Trump.
The man Smith is describing here is a true historical figure who spent much of the 1860s and ’70s trying to prove that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the son of a baron. He was in fact almost certainly (as Smith’s point-of-view character well knows) a butcher of no particular consequence named Arthur Orton. For Britain’s working classes, the Tichborne Claimant, as Orton was known, became a symbol of the working man at last making good, muscling his way into the ranks of the aristocracy. They loved him, mostly because he kept insisting that he was not one of them.
It is the Tichborne Claimant, with his love of a crowd, his skill at comedic repartee on the stand, his ability to embody a populist cause for which he himself has no particular loyalty, who is the clearest of the frauds in The Fraud, the first Zadie Smith novel to be written in the Trump years. But other, less obvious frauds populate the pages, whispering deceit to everyone around them, including themselves.
At the center of The Fraud is Mrs. Touchet, a stern and acid-tongued gentlewoman in reduced circumstances, working as a housekeeper for her deceased husband’s cousin. Mrs. Touchet’s employer, William Ainsworth, is a prolific and reportedly terrible Victorian novelist. At the height of his career, Ainsworth outsold Charles Dickens; within 30 years of his death, he’d become all but forgotten. Ainsworth is another of the clearer frauds of this novel: a hack writer masquerading as a literary man, maintaining friendships with other novelists who flatter his ego.
“Not infrequently, he wrote twenty pages in an afternoon,” Mrs. Touchet observes. “He always appeared entirely satisfied with every line.”
Mrs. Touchet is characteristically clear-eyed over Ainsworth’s writing ability, but she is affectionate toward him nonetheless. In their youth, they play with whips and tethers together; in old age, they bicker companionably. He is, she thinks, the only person in the world who truly knows her, because only he has known her through the whole 40-year scope of this novel.
Yet Mrs. Touchet keeps secrets even from Ainsworth, both big and small. As his friend, she never tells him how much she dislikes his writing. As his housekeeper, she manages him with a vast slew of tiny white lies to keep him from making choices she herself finds inconvenient. Most importantly, she never tells Ainsworth that she was in love with his dead wife, Frances, and that she went to bed with Frances, too.
It is her secret attraction for other women that Mrs. Touchet considers to be her own fraud, one she can never reveal to anyone else. Otherwise, Mrs. Touchet tries to live a life authentic to her conscience. She is a political progressive: a feminist, an abolitionist, a radical Catholic who campaigns to end British slavery and rolls her eyes at the complacent liberalism of Ainsworth and his wealthy writer friends. With her sardonic, intelligent voice, she is a thoroughly lovable protagonist, a character it’s easy to identify with.
Smith, however, makes it clear that Mrs. Touchet has been unable to thoroughly internalize all her laudable political beliefs. Her fraudulence becomes most clear in the most fascinating section of The Fraud, when Mrs. Touchet becomes obsessed with a formerly enslaved Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle, a witness in the trial of the Tichborne Claimant.
Bogle is one of the only figures admired on both sides of the Tichborne dispute, and the one everyone agrees has been hard done by, both within the novel and historically. He used to be a servant in the Tichborne home, and now he’s testifying that he recognizes the Claimant as Sir Roger. By so testifying, he’s lost the pension the family guaranteed him. Reporters on both sides emphasize Bogle’s innate nobility, how clear it is that in a world of frauds, Bogle is an honest and straightforward man who has gained nothing by testifying.
Mrs. Touchet sees, in Bogle’s palpable honesty, a match for her beloved lost Frances. She starts to follow him. She will not let up until Bogle tells her his story, which at last he does in a long, searing interlude that takes up the central third of The Fraud.
Bogle’s story begins with his father’s capture and enslavement at age 10. It tracks the brutal regime of life on a Jamaican sugar plantation, the violence, the maiming. Bogle is pulled off the plantation to work as a valet at age 16 more or less by sheer luck; he finds out he’s free when the man he works for casually tells him he’s going to be added to the payroll. When he makes it to England, life becomes less violent but still brutal, free of respect or love.
Mrs. Touchet sees Bogle’s life story as the revelation of a great truth: The problem of Jamaica is alive and present in England, too. “It was and had always been everywhere, like weather,” Mrs. Touchet marvels. She is overwhelmed by Bogle’s tale, and she imagines that they have formed a great intimacy. If he has confided so much in her, surely he understands that she is a good white person?
Bogle, however, is unmoved by Mrs. Touchet. He feels no particular closeness to her. He tells her his story because he is honest, but he has no interest in the pieties of her political beliefs.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Touchet shrinks away from direct physical contact with Black people. She finds herself willing to overlook her own political beliefs when they become particularly inconvenient to her. Her fraudulence emerges slowly, and then all at once, all the more upsetting because Mrs. Touchet means so well and thinks so hard.
The Fraud is a more successful Zadie Smith novel than her 2016 outing Swing Time, which contained striking images and interesting ideas but was hampered by a deliberate lack of center. The heart of The Fraud is flawed, charismatic Mrs. Touchet, who is so intelligent and yet not quite intelligent enough to see all the ways she fails herself.
Still, the three stories of this novel never quite cohere into one grand piece. We hop back and forth between the Tichborne case and the Ainsworth house and Bogle’s story without ever quite finding any connective tissue outside the pleasure of seeing the world through Mrs. Touchet’s sardonic eyes; that, and the petty workaday horror of fraud after fraud after fraud.
In our own fraudulent age, with our man with no center making his way back to the front of his beloved crowds for another presidential campaign — well, there’s so much joy in watching Zadie Smith deconstruct a lie that the flaws in this book might not matter all that much. There’s enough that works.
Private school vouchers lost a lot of battles, but they may have won the war.
As the new school year kicks off, education advocates are bracing for continued attacks on America’s public schools. Yet despite the ongoing culture wars schools have faced in recent years, pollsters find that parents still generally like their kids’ schools, and most of the political opposition has come from those without kids in the public school system.
Cara Fitzpatrick, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and editor at Chalkbeat, is the author of The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America, a book coming out next week that traces the history of the fight to define what “public education” means and who gets to decide. She lays out in clarifying detail the patient strategy conservatives embraced to expand their vision for schooling in America, establishing small school choice programs and then using those experiments to push the boundaries of state and federal law.
Senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen talked with Fitzpatrick about the trajectory of school vouchers as an idea and the future of public schooling in the US. Their conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Rachel Cohen
Your book does a very good job of showing how the boundaries between church and state have eroded over the last few decades, and why the legal arguments for private school vouchers have gotten stronger as a result. I think many readers will be surprised to learn all of this, so emphatically have we been taught that there’s a separation between religion and public institutions.
Cara Fitzpatrick
When I started doing the research, I thought there was going to be this very clear line between church and state, but the legal history was murkier, which is why then we’ve seen this progression of cases more recently leaning more toward the religious liberty side of things. One of the questions I often get asked is, “Well, how can you give money to a religious school?” And it’s like, “Here’s 40, 50, 70 years of case law that kind of explains it.” But if you’re not following all those cases, most people find that to be pretty confusing.
Rachel Cohen
Yeah, there’s always been a small legal window, and over time conservatives have cleaved that open wider. But we had basically been taught in schools that it was a firm, unchanging boundary.
Cara Fitzpatrick
And there have been justices on the Supreme Court who have spoken to the fact that it’s just this tricky area of law, and has been tricky for a long time. And then watching where the Court has gone recently with the Establishment Clause has been kind of wild, actually, because it’s pretty far from where they were when some of these early school voucher cases were litigated. I think it’s gone even farther than school choice advocates thought it would.
Rachel Cohen
Where would you say things are today?
Cara Fitzpatrick
I think it’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has been ruling in favor of religious liberty — not just in school choice cases but in a variety of cases — and I think the window is open for it to go even further than it has. I mean, I’m really interested in where it’s going to go with the religious charter school issue that’s coming out of Oklahoma. I don’t want to predict how that will go, but I think it seems like there’s definitely some room to believe that the conservative majority might eventually sign off on that.
Rachel Cohen
Private school vouchers have been picking up steam lately, making political gains in recent years. What were some of the most surprising things you learned about the history of school vouchers, and what, if anything, about that history feels important to understanding the programs we’re seeing today?
Cara Fitzpatrick
One of the things that was interesting for me to grapple with was that in the 1950s and ’60s, segregationists in the South essentially used the idea of school vouchers to thwart Brown v. Board of Education. But then in the 1990s and 2000s, school choice advocates argued this was a civil rights issue. So I’ve been trying to sort out and make connections between those two eras.
One of the main figures in the book is Polly Williams, who was a Black state representative in Wisconsin who very much viewed vouchers as a tool of empowerment for low-income kids, and particularly low-income kids of color. Her involvement in that issue was really fascinating and kind of linked those two periods in a way. Williams had fears that vouchers would become sort of what they’ve become today: subsidies for everyone, regardless of income.
I think one of the things I really wanted to do with the book was not take a hard and fast position on school choice or on school vouchers, but give someone who might come across a headline about universal school vouchers a way to understand how we got here.
Rachel Cohen
The title of your book is The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America. I hear you on not wanting to take a clear position on vouchers or choice, but I think conservatives may argue it’s simply a new era of public school, not the death of it. I wanted to invite you to talk more about your title.
Cara Fitzpatrick
I think the title and subtitle will please no one. But for me, I think it raises that question, right? Does this spell the end for the public school system? That’s something that I had to grapple with throughout because, even just a few years ago, it was very much a talking point from school choice advocates that choice can help drive improvements to traditional public schools. But then in the last couple of years we’ve seen some pretty aggressive attacks on public education by Republicans and the rhetoric has definitely become more extreme, referring to schools as “government indoctrination camps” and things like that. A few prominent conservative school choice advocates have pretty openly said we should really use these school culture wars to push the movement forward.
Rachel Cohen
Based on your research, do you see any sort of path for the more liberal, progressive vision of public education to mount a comeback? Is there any sort of competing strategy in the courts or politics?
Cara Fitzpatrick
It’s hard to predict. The book is landing — just coincidentally — at this moment in time when school choice is dominating the news cycle and “parental rights” are all over the place. But even just a few years ago, I remember in 2017 a couple people saying to me, “Well, aren’t school vouchers dead?”
Education can really change in a short period of time. It does feel to me like Milton Friedman’s side of the debate on the free-market vision for vouchers has really eclipsed what Polly Williams and some of the more progressive voices were about. But I think some of this may depend on how the new choice programs actually play out, including whether people take states up on these universal voucher programs.
Rachel Cohen
Is the lesson here to just stick with a political goal for 50 or 60 years and then eventually you might win?
Cara Fitzpatrick
Maybe! It is really fascinating: On vouchers, conservatives have played the long game and it seems to have worked out pretty well for them.
Rachel Cohen
There’s often this debate over whether charters or vouchers or tax credit scholarships result in better academic outcomes for students, either through competition or simply by injecting the power of “privateness” into the equation. Did your book lead you to any conclusions or clarity on those questions?
Cara Fitzpatrick
I think there’s a pretty solid amount of research at this point — not about universal vouchers, since that’s still kind of new and uncharted territory — but on some of these voucher programs that have existed for a long time. And what researchers have found is that the programs haven’t lived up to the promise of what the early advocates wanted or assumed would happen. I think there was this belief that private schools were just sort of inherently better than public schools, so if you just got more kids in private then all those kids would do better. A lot of the major research studies have shown either the same results for test scores between public and private, or actually a decline in private. And then there’s been a little bit of research on some other life outcomes that have been positive, like showing kids in some of these voucher programs are more likely to graduate.
There are a lot of studies out there, some far less rigorous than others, and I think wading through all that can be a little intimidating. What I believe and I wanted the book to show is that this debate in America is really more about values than about outcomes.
Rachel Cohen
We’re in a moment when the conservative legal movement is at its strongest on school choice and teacher unions are in a very weakened position. Can you talk about the role you saw unions play in accelerating or slowing down these policies? How much do you think it matters today that unions are in a less powerful position?
Cara Fitzpatrick
Unions were typically opponents of school choice programs, but I didn’t get into the role of specific union leaders in the book with the exception of [former American Federation of Teachers president] Albert Shanker, since he was sort of outside the mold of what a lot of union leaders were saying. But I didn’t see unions’ opposition making a huge difference for the most part. Mostly they become convenient scapegoats in the partisan conversations.
With teacher unions, what’s interesting is that a lot of their fears about where the programs would go seem to have come true. Unions warned from the start that this was not in fact going to be just a little experiment, that these programs are not going to be just limited to disadvantaged students, and now we are seeing these universal programs pass.
Unions have played pivotal roles in different places and in moments of time in blocking or slowing school choice, but ultimately I don’t think that they were necessarily going to stop all of this. They stopped some of it. A lot of voucher proposals failed. It’s just that enough of them passed to have this toehold over time.
How to cope with both inflation and lifestyle creep.
On the Money is a new monthly advice column written by Nicole Dieker, a personal finance expert who’s been writing about money for over a decade. For Vox’s Money Talks interview column, she’s written stories about couples who run small businesses, navigate different relationships with spending, handle health insurance, and more. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed.
I’m a single man in my late 20s. Every month, I rent one room of a shared house in a high-cost-of-living city for $1,050, have a $72 commuting-to-work expense (covered by my employer), spend about $60 on games and a gaming PC, $300 on food, $300 on going out (dancing and the like), $200 on travel (averaged out, very spiky) and $250 on other incidentals (health care costs after employer-provided insurance, clothing, presents, and gifts, etc.). That’s about $2,250, and from my perspective, I live an indulgent and sybaritic lifestyle that still allows me to pay my taxes, donate 10 percent of my income, and save aggressively.
I know that some of my peers have to pay off student loans, but for many of them, it seems to be more than that. I’m worried that lifestyle creep, or whatever it is that happens to them, will affect me as well. How can I watch out for it? Where is it most likely to come from?
I don’t know if you will ever become the type of person who spends more than he earns. It looks like you’ve already identified your key financial values — saving aggressively for the future, donating money so other people can have a better future as well — and those are the kinds of behaviors that tend to stick over the course of a lifetime.
That said, I can almost guarantee that you will spend more in the future than you are spending right now.
Why? Because someday you’re going to decide you’re tired of living with a rotating cast of roommates, or you’re going to make the kind of career move that requires you to spend more than $50 per month on clothing, or you’re going to meet the kind of person who becomes an integral part of your life and connects you to all kinds of new family members who all require gifts, travel, food, going out, and so on.
Lifestyle creep happens when we change the way we live — and even if you plan on living like a single 20-something man for the rest of your life, spending your sybaritic, indulgent days gaming and dancing, that’s probably not going to happen.
So start asking yourself where you want to be in five years, and then ask yourself what’s likely to happen to your friends and family during the same time period. Do you have a sibling who is likely to have a child, for example? Bump up your travel and gift budget. Start setting aside cash for your friends’ weddings — because they’re going to happen, and some of them will be destination weddings, and many of them will take place during the same year — and if there’s any possibility that you might end up planning a wedding of your own, ask yourself how much you might want to spend on the celebration.
Next, take a look at where you are in your career and where you might need to move (literally and figuratively) to achieve your five-year career goals. I suspect you value work-life balance as much as you value a balanced budget, so I’m going to let you know something in advance: At a certain point, you’ll probably end up with the kind of work-life balance that is incompatible with a room in a shared house. First because you’ll need the stability that comes with having a space of your own, and second because you may want to use your living space for entertaining family, friends, and colleagues. You’re the kind of person who will probably get into cooking, since it’s a great way to save money, and you could end up being the star of your office’s annual potluck.
If that’s the kind of life you’re likely to have, it might mean setting aside money for a down payment. Furniture. A new HVAC unit, sometime in the next five years. Maybe a car, if you don’t already have one, which means insurance and tires and oil changes and paying to keep the thing clean enough to drive it into the office parking lot without having your employer wonder whether the amount of bird shit on your car suggests that you don’t have your shit together.
That, by the way, is why people spend so much. The amount of money it takes to keep our shit together goes up as we get older — even if you successfully maintain the kind of lifestyle that is built around saving, donating to charity, enjoying the occasional indulgence, and acquiring as few unnecessary possessions as possible.
And yes, it will happen to you.
Get ready.
How are other millennials coping with the cost-of-living crisis?
I’m going to assume that by “millennials,” you mean “people my age.” You probably aren’t the 20-something in the shared house from the previous letter; you’re the 30-something or 40-something who is trying to maintain a home (whether you’re buying or renting) while skipping vacations, spending as little as you can on groceries, and trying to figure out if there’s an even cheaper phone plan out there somewhere.
The 20-something who wrote the first letter might not yet understand what it’s like to be financially responsible for sewer backups and school lunches and making sure you’re dressed for the job you want, even if you only wear the top half of your outfit during Zoom calls. Twenty-somethings, even the ones who save aggressively and donate 10 percent of their income to charity, haven’t been budgeting long enough to notice that we’re all spending a lot more than we used to — and getting a lot less.
On the one hand, that lack of comparative knowledge could be a plus. Imagine if you never did any of your own shopping until you became an adult, and then you went to the grocery store for the first time and a dozen eggs cost $3.50. “This must be what eggs cost,” you’d think. Then you’d figure out how to include eggs in your budget.
That is, unfortunately, the same advice I have for you and for all millennials. The way we cope with the cost-of-living crisis is by looking it in the face and accepting it as reality.
This is what things cost right now.
If you are in a situation where things — eggs, houses, Zoom-appropriate workwear — cost more than you can afford to pay, here are your options:
Earn more. Easier said than done, but very worth doing.
Spend less. A little easier to do (since there’s always at least one subscription service to cut), but saving $10 or $20 or even $100 every month probably won’t solve the bigger problem.
Move to a lower-cost-of-living area. That’s what I did back in 2017, and I moved to an even lower-cost-of-living area in 2020. Bought a house at 2 percent interest; bought a car with cash. (I know this won’t work for everybody, especially if your family or your career ties you to a specific part of the country, but at least one of the millennials reading this column should seriously consider it.)
Practice aggressive debt management. Accept that you’re going to go into consumer debt. Build a sterling credit score (on-time payments will get you most of the way there). Get very good at shuffling your balances between 0 percent intro APR cards. If you can snag a personal loan at 6 percent interest, use it to pay off your cards in full. Rinse, lather, never miss a payment.
Share the cost of living with others. Multigenerational housing is a thing! So are roommates, carpools, and community gardens. Even simple day-to-day activities like trading child care or casseroles or Zoom-appropriate workwear with a friend or neighbor can help mitigate some of the rising costs of living.
Start preparing for where you want to be in five years. Hey, it’s the same advice I gave the first letter-writer! Figure out where you might want to go in your career, especially if you can position yourself toward a higher-paying job, and figure out what you need to do to get there. Ask yourself what milestones your loved ones are likely to experience, and start setting aside the money you’ll need to cover them. Cut another subscription. Get off social media. Invest in what matters, and try to choose the kinds of investments — family, career, community — that offer the biggest returns.
And remember: If eggs get too expensive, you can always substitute unsweetened applesauce.