Yesterday it was the British, today it is the American reviews of Zadie Smith’s NW (with a stray Canadian and Australian for good measure).

Michiko Kakutani’s review in the New York Times we’ve already talked about. As we have Joyce Carol Oates’s in the New York Review of Books.

At the Washington Post, the headline on Ron Charles’s review says it all: “A brilliant novel – for the dedicated reader.”

Over on the West Coast, at the Los Angeles Times, David L Ulin reckons the novel traces ”an inner landscape that we all know because it is ours also: intractable, transient, by turns defining and elusive, as “[w]e wait for an experience large or brutal enough to disturb it or break it open completely, but this moment never arrives.”

In the magazines, Ruth Franklin in the New Republic sees Smith as being on an “endless and endlessly interesting journey toward an identity as a writer”.

Online, in the Barnes and Noble Review, Sarah L Courteau concludes that Smith is “a rare breed: a novelist whose work as a critic has improved her fiction”.

NW gets a good review in Salon. Of course it does, it’s by Laura Miller.

In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Lisa Moore says “Smith offers an experiment in form that refuses to tidy itself up before it heads out onto the streets”. She makes a nice MIA reference along the way, too.

“That 10-year-old tap-dancer has grown up to become less flashy and even more sure-footed,” says Malcolm Forbes in the Australian. Ten-year-old tap-dancer? You’d better read this by James Wood.