I don't get it?!

Leah and Natalie/Keisha's relationship was under pressure due to class difference. They were from the same background, same school, and still lived in the same area. Natalie managed to become a Oxbridge student, attend law school, become a barrister and marry a wealthy man. Leah was troubled by how her friend had changed, and how she was perceived by Natalie's new friends, particularly at her dinner parties. She worked in social care, was married to a ambitious man, but still felt, comparing herself to Natalie, she had achieved nothing, and she was trying to figure out how to live her life. Zadie Smith's novels also reflect on race, and the fact that Natalie's fortunes rose, while Leah's didn't, and her (white) family was also still living in council housing, added more tension to their relationship. Leah was by no means racist, but both Leah and Natalie remembered their growing up together and fancying the same boys at school. Natalie felt guilty that she was now socially above her schoolfriends and people she had known all her life. She felt that they saw her as a coconut- black on the outside and white on the inside.

In the book and the movie all of Leah and Natalie's schoolfriends became criminals, drug addicts, or both. In the book Natalie's mother lost all the money the family had because she gave it to a project building churches in Africa that turned out to be a scam. The movie made me realize how much both Natalie and Leah were anxious and felt guilty about trying to rise above the people they grew up with. I think Leah didn't want children out of fear she would become like the people around her - the movie suggested that Natalie emotionally neglected her children sometimes, and left them in care of the nanny.

The film made me empathize more with Nathan, as it makes him more sympathetic than the way he is portrayed in the novel (the film cut a long sequence where he visits a female friend in Soho before he travels back and is killed on his way home). He struggles to improve his life and tries to help his troubled father, but ultimately he falls victim to a local thug (Nathan is his accomplice). I appreciated the portraits of strong and kind black men: both Leah and Natalie have black partners. Nathan's killing is a memento mori for Leah and Natalie, and by informing the police they rise above the violence that was part of their background growing up. Nathan's killing also shows how vulnerable life is for them and the people they live with: Natalie cries when she sees how the little boy she passes in the street is already used to seeing murder sites in their neighborhood.

I still don't understand Natalie's attraction to internet sex sites and sex with strangers. Perhaps she felt that her new life and new identity was so unreal she had to mix with people like the ones she grew up up to atone for it, or to feel more like she did when she was growing up in an area surrounded by drug use and constant danger.