NW

In the first sections of NW, readers confront Leah’s experience with crime, marriage, pregnancy, and professional life. She represents a kind of ethical consciousness on one hand and near-emptiness on the other. The first scene presents her outdoors, surrounded by the literal and figurative noise of everyday life. She hears neighbors screaming and radio sounds, reads a magazine, and can’t help but find her thoughts distracted by “world events and property and film and music [...] also sport and the short descriptions of the dead” (4). Readers do not find out much about Leah herself—her husband’s name (Michel) even appears pages before her own. Though she has a job, a husband, and a home, and received an education, she struggles to find meaning, asking herself “what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended for her?” (36). 

Michel, on the other hand, is ambitious, “always moving forward, thinking of the next thing” (32). For him, this means increasing their income (through his currency trading scheme), eventually moving out of their modest apartment, and most importantly, having children. His optimism causes Leah to note, “Michel is a good man, full of hope. Sometimes hope is exhausting” (32). Despite their differences, Michel and Leah are united in being outsiders in some sense. Both are children of immigrants: Leah’s mother is from Ireland, while Michel’s family is French-Algerian. Both are uncomfortable in their current state of life, albeit for different reasons: Michel wants to climb the socio-economic ladder, while Leah wants to find her sense of self.

A range of external factors—economic, social, cultural—exacerbate their sense of alienation, threatening to disrupt life as they know it. The most immediate threat in this first section is the presence of criminal activity, represented by Shar. At the same time, Shar’s entrance into Leah’s life fills her existential void, at least temporarily. Leah has a soft spot for pitiful people—she works at an organization that distributes lottery money to charities and as a youth made a habit of talking to every homeless person she met. Thus, when Shar presents herself as a desperate woman in need instead of a drug addict, Leah can’t help but try to help. Later, after Leah realizes that Shar had simply conned her, she becomes obsessed. The extent of the obsession is made clear by the episode in which she tracks down Shar’s apartment and pushes addiction recovery leaflets through her mail slot. It is as though the drama Shar brought, no matter how deplorable, injected some much-needed life into Leah. 

The geography of NW—eminently walkable—enables Leah’s search for Shar, which itself represents her inner yearnings. Some passages in this first section of NW literally present her walking paths as directions from a navigation app. Others suggest them via a dizzying array of advertising snippets, sights, sounds, and smells: “TV cable, computer cable, audiovisual cables, I give you good price, good price. Leaflets, call abroad 4 less, learn English, eyebrow wax, Falun Gong, have you accepted Jesus as your personal call plan? Everybody loves fried chicken” (42). Elsewhere, this modern-day geography clashes with London’s historical and literary past: The 19th-century novelist Charles Dickens is imagined to be walking “this far west and north for a pint or to bury someone. Look, there, on the library carpet between Science Fiction and Local History: a knotted condom filled with sperm. Once this was all farm and field with country villas” (60). 

Passages like these exemplify the narrative voice of NW. The novel is experimental, showcasing a mix of styles that encompasses straightforward narrative, stream of consciousness, map directions, instant messaging chats, and more. The narrator, where there is one, is a third-person limited voice who does not give readers full insight into what characters are doing or thinking. NW is more interested in showing than explaining.