Ok so why did it take me so long to read Zadie Smith's fiction? And why does it have a criminally low rating on this website?

Smith plays with form, characterization, and social commentary in a seemingly effortless manner in this novel. I enjoyed the ways in which Smith broke traditional form, but still maintained readability. There was even one ~meta~ moment where a character refers to breaking form: “I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that… You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?” The tracing of individuals from childhood to adulthood and commenting on how their class level stagnates or changes was a strong theme throughout.

I will admit, I missed the nuance at the end of Felix's section and the section with Natalie and Nathan, so I was slow to the understanding that Natalie comes to at the end of the book (another instance of me needing to slow down when I'm reading oops). However, looking back, I feel like the Natalie and Nathan section was a bit too ambigruous and wish there was a bit more clarity there. I did love the way Smith finishes the last sentence with the switch to Keisha instead of Natalie "disguising her voice with her voice" and felt it dealt a final punch of commentary on the theme of class.

Favorite moments:
-I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
-The story, once rationed, offered a few times a year, now bursts through every phone call, including this one which has nothing at all to do with Pauline. Time is compressing for the mother, she has a short distance left to go. She means to squeeze the past into a thing small enough to take with her. It’s the daughter’s job to listen. She’s no good at it.
-Why must love “move forward”? Which way is forward? No one can say she has not been warned. No one can say that. A 35 year old woman married to a man she loves has most certainly be warned, should be paying attention, should be listening, and not be at all surprised when her husband says [interrupted by husband explaining fertility]—many days in which the woman is fertile.
-chapter 7 of part 1 (apple tree chapter)
-Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.
-Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded…
-They sit on the throne in silence, staring out in different directions. The problem seems to be 2 different conceptions of time. She knows the pull of her animal nature should, by now, be making the decisions. Perhaps she’s been a city fox too long. Every new arrival—the announcements seem to come now every day—feels like a terrible betrayal. Why won’t everybody stay still? She has forced a stillness in herself, but it has not stopped the world from continuing on. And then the things that happen only serve to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that happen only serve to horribly close down the possibilities of all the other things that didn’t happen, and so number 37, and so the door opening at the moment that she stands there…
-Maybe it doesn’t matter that life never blossomed into something larger than itself. Moored to the shore she set out from, as almost all women were, once.
-The next morning, they arrive in the kitchen in mellow mood, in t-shirts and pants, sloping into the wide expanse of a Saturday morning.
-“Life’s not a video game, Felix–there aren’t a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn’t actually any next level. The bad news is everybody dies at the end. Game over.”
-Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.
-In households all over the world, in many languages, this sentence usually emerges, eventually: “I don’t know you anymore.” It was always there, hiding in some private corner of the house, biding its time. Stacked with the cups, or squeezed between the DVDs or another terminal format. “I don’t know you anymore!”
-“Really good to see you,” said Leah. “You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.” Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but rather out of a fearful knowledge that if reverse the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms. Blake having no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone.
-It is perhaps the profound way in which capitalism enters women’s minds and bodies that renders “ruthless comparison” the basic mode of their relationships with others.
She had been asked to pass the entirety of herself through a hole that would accept only part.
-The idea that her own existence might be linked to people living 600 years past! No longer an accidental guest at the table–as she had always understood herself to be–but a host, with other hosts, continuing a tradition.
-People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence. [referring to gossiping]
-Happiness is not an absolute value. It is a state of comparison. Were they any unhappier than Imran and Ameeta? Those people over there? You?
-She could only justify herself to herself when she worked.
-She assumed it was the remnants of her faith that made her fretful and suspicious that these good deeds were, in fact, a further, veiled, example of self-interest, representing only the assuaging of conscience. Acknowledging the root of this suspicion did nothing to disperse it.
-Wasn’t there something juvenile in the very idea of “fond memories”?
-If it was not quite possible to feel happy for him it was because the arrangement was timeless–it did not come bound by the constrictions of time–and this in turn was the consequence of a crucial detail: no women were included within the schema. Women come bearing time. Natalie had brought time into this house.
-“I hate the way the camera jumps all over the place like that… You can’t forget about the filming for a minute. Why do they always do that these days?” [funny meta reference to the book’s format–this section of the book is over 180 short chapters that sometimes go linear but also digress]
-Which is all to say that the brutal awareness of the real that she had so hoped for and desired–that she hadn’t even realized she was counting on–failed to arrive.
-Caldwell people felt everything would be fine as long as you didn’t actually throw the child down the stairs. Non-Caldwell people felt nothing would be fine unless everything was done perfectly and even then there was no guarantee. She had never been so happy to see Caldwell people. She could not place Leah Hanwell in this schema with any accuracy, as it is hardest to caricature the people you’ve loved best in your life.
-Natalie Blake had completely forgotten what it was like to be poor. It was a language she’d stopped being able to speak, or even to understand.
-Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag…. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.
-“I don’t know what I’m going to want until when I want it.”
-She peered over into the pit that separates people who have known intolerable pain from people who haven’t… And it was into this pit that she had so nearly placed Frank, her children, her mother, Leah. Anyone who had ever cared for her.
-“I just don’t understand why I have this life… Why that girl and not us… It doesn’t make sense to me.”