White Teeth: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Zadie SmithEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-06-12
ISBN: 0375703861
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375703867
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of White Teeth: A Novel
Book Review: More or Less?
Summary: 4 Stars
This book is about 450 pages long, give or take. It should have been either 600 pages or 300 pages, I'm not sure which.
That's not really a criticism as such. On the contrary, the virtues of "White Teeth" are so intriguing that I wanted either a fuller, more comprehensive story of these characters and their lives, or else a tighter, more gripping version with the less fully-realized elements cut out. What we have here is manifestly the work of a young author, terrifically excited by her ideas and abilities, anxious to get it all said. She's not unlike some of her own younger characters in that way, which is rather charming. All the more remarkable that Zadie Smith, in her early twenties, also presented some believable older characters with a cooler (not necessarily wiser) approach to life.
Thematically, this book wants to investigate the difficulties of immigrants to England (particularly people of color) and their London-born children. The issues facing such people are, of course, significant, and the second generation of the novel's two main families find various ways of establishing identities for themselves - some workable and some less so. None of this material is new; novelists have been confronting it for close to a hundred years, and at first I wondered why we needed yet another book on the subject. Indeed, from time to time "White Teeth" runs afoul of the tendency to discuss the issue explicitly. Most of the time, though, Ms. Smith is careful to show the emotional cost of this identity confusion to parents and children both, and there's a good enough balance of humor and pain to make the story engrossing.
A lot of current novels seem to think they can dispense with classic structure - the movement from beginning to middle to end in three acts - and simply throw a lot of imaginative detail and clever prose into a stew. I'm happy to report that Ms. Smith was too smart for that, but unfortunately she didn't quite have the chops to pull off the nifty structural idea she came up with to replace the classic form. "White Teeth" begins by kicking off tales from a variety of countries and historical periods, gradually coming to focus on two families: native Englishman Archie Jones, his much younger Jamaican-born wife Clara Bowden, their daughter Irie, Archie's old World War II Army buddy, the Bangaldeshi Samad Iqbal, Samad's much younger wife Alsana, and their twin boys Mittal and Magid. The whole bunch of them, and the clever but insular Chalfen family of English Jews, gradually move toward a final confrontation one New Year's Eve at a London museum, bringing with them two kinds of religious fundamentalism, scientific controversy, political activism, adolescent sexual hysteria, homesickness, and a generous helping of good will. In short, the novel begins in a diffuse panorama of miscellany, and concentrates its focus bit by bit to a pinpoint by the last few pages.
I may have seen a similar design elsewhere, but if so I can't remember it. What's more, because the characters are distinct, funny, heartbreaking, ridiculous and real, one wants to follow them straight through the plot to that museum no matter what distractions occur. Works fairly well. I have a hunch it would have worked much better if Ms. Smith had introduced all her characters and themes as early as possible and followed them to her last page in some sort of rhythm. As it is, she seems to pull in elements whenever her story happens to call for them, which makes the novel rather stumble around at times.
Add to this structural weakness an overabundance of incident and character and you've got something very good rather than excellent. Like a lot of first-time authors, Ms. Smith never threw away a single idea. There's an account of Archie and Samad's convoluted war adventures, the history of Clara's family and its dedication to the Jehovah's Witnesses, Irie's body-image problems, Samad's desperate attempts to mold at least one of his sons into a good Muslim, the scene at Archie and Samad's favorite post-work hangout, Samad's endless insistence on his great-grandfather's heroism during the Indian Mutiny, at least two secret extremist organizations, and on and on. It's a mark of Ms. Smith's ability that I actually wanted more of all of it. For a mid-length novel, though, it's a bit much.
This is not even to bring up the question of what the book's title means. Teeth get a mention from time to time, and I half-expected someone to remark on the supposedly brilliant choppers of people of color; turns out that the image of white teeth is one of those metaphors that doesn't really refer to anything. Not enormously important, merely a trifle confusing, but the title does emphasize the occasional over-richness of this particular dessert. Maybe that's what Zadie Smith meant when she admitted, in a recent interview, that today she finds her first novel "nauseating". She's being unnecessarily hard on herself; "White Teeth" is far from nauseating. At most, it produces a mild case of indigestion.
Fortunately, unlike over-rich foods, indulging in over-rich fiction like this is not bad for your health. On to Ms. Smith's more mature work - should be quite stunning.
Benshlomo says, Here's to literary whipped cream, folks - dig in.
Summary of White Teeth: A Novel
Zadie Smith?s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith?s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England?s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn?t quite match her name (Jamaican for ?no problem?). Samad?s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal?s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London?s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.
Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions:
The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man.Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "They have both lost their way," he grumbles. "Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry
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