White Teeth: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
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Book Reviews of White Teeth: A Novel
Book Review: Simply Superb
Summary: 5 Stars
"White Teeth" came highly recommended by a trusted reader and I've finally gotten around to reading it. The story revolves around three families, three cultures, three religions (Chalfenism among them) and three histories. Is it good things or bad things that come in threes? Set in London yet rooted in Jamaica and Bangladesh, "White Teeth" is a convergence of class, history, and culture. The Jones' are an interracial English/Jamaican couple brought together by their individual need to flee. Archibal fleeing the chaos of a marriage seized by mental illness; Clara escaping the grip of the Jehovah Witness religion that threatens to permeate all aspects of her life. The Iqbals' are an arranged marriage, brought together by cultural and religious history. Samad conflicted by a history he fears will be erased by the present; Alsana, strong and willful, yet unable to absorb aspects of western culture that are foreign to her religious beliefs. The Chalfens are an agnostic English couple brought together by the desire to further a tradition of intellectual and liberal empire. Marcus, a scientist from a long line of intellectuals, is engaged in research that could alter the genetic makeup of humanity in ways that could eliminate the randomness of genetic mishaps and malfunctions (the very randomness that is seen by some as the will of God); Joyce a horticulturalist and essayist with an overbearing need to nurture and cultivate everything and everyone around her.
Although the interactions of the parental units creatively and humorously explore the historical affects of colonization on the colonized and the colonizer, it is the lives of the next generation of Iqbals, Jones and Chalfens that allow the author to explore issues of cultural, religious and class differences between the western and eastern hemisphere. Irie, the biracial daughter of the Jones', is burdened not only with the trials of adolescence within the pop culture of a modernized England but also with the history of colonized Jamaica and the salvation sought by her grandmother through the doctrine of the Jehovah Witness faith. Millat and Magid, the Cain and Able offspring of the Iqbals' are challenged with questions of identify in the face of an Islamic tradition that seems at constant odds with the more liberal communities within which they live. Joshua, the Chalfens' progeny is also trying to navigate the choppy waters of puberty as he realizes that the lineage he's inherited may be at stark contrast to the person he's becoming.
"White Teeth" is a spectacular debut novel. Smith has unleashed a level of creativity typically found in seasoned writers. She has created memorable, lively characters each with a unique voice that highlights the diversity of London while simultaneously calling attention to the commonality of experience inherent in the legacy of oppression. I particularly enjoyed the cleaver way in which Smith uses teeth as a metaphor throughout the novel. For certainly history is deeply rooted in who we are as individuals, a people, a nation. While there are times when we must extract ourselves from our history to forge a path that allows us to live up to our full potential, our history will always be the pulp at the center of who we are and invariably impacts our future. This is great text for group discussion. Highly Recommended!
Book Review: A Brilliant Comic Debut
Summary: 4 Stars
Zadie Smith's remarkable first novel, White Teeth, deserves all the praise and attention it's gotten since its publication two years ago. This big, rich multicultural cacophony of a novel is a brilliant comic narrative that captures the mixture and conflict of races, ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs in London at the millenium. Moreover, unlike other British writers who sometimes seem condescending and unabashedly full of themselves (Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie immediately come to mind), Zadie Smith's writing is full of good humor and prescient insight into the value of even the most disparate life experiences. Smith anchors her story around the unlikely friendship of an easy-going, seemingly unflappable working-class Englishman, Archibald Jones, and a deep-thinking, serious Bengali Muslim waiter, Samad Iqbal. The two first meet inside a tank in the waning days of World War II. They then reunite thirty years later in North London, two unsuccessful middle aged men living out their lives in O'Connell's Poolroom, "an Irish poolroom run by Arabs with no pool tables." But while the stories of Archie and Samad anchor the narrative, their relationship is only a small part of this hilarious and deeply insightful novel.
Zadie Smith, in reviewing her own novel in the British publication Butterfly, described White Teeth as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing ten-year-old." The amazing thing is that her description is accurate, for we get not merely the story of the unlikely pair of Archie and Samad, but also many other amusing and intersecting stories, all of them driven by the clash of culture, belief, race, traditon, lineage, and science which forms the turmoil which marks London, and all of the Western world's major cities, at the millenium. We get the story of Archie's young Jamaican wife, Clara, and of Clara's mother, Hortense, a devout and rapturous Jehovah's Witness. We get the story of Samad's turbulent relationship with his wife, Alsana, as well as Samad's struggle to raise his two twin sons, Millat and Magid, in the face of a materialist culture that pervades and undermines traditionalism of all kinds. We get the story of Marcus and Joyce Chalfen, one a geneticist and the other a pop horticulturist, and their son, Josh. The Chalfens are unstintingly secular, scientific and self-centered celebrants of their own ideology of "Chalfenism". Finally, we get the story of Irie, the awkward daughter of Archie and Clara, who winds through the novel, its characters and situations, searching for an identity in the tangled history of her Jamaican past and the crowded cultural stew of her North London present.
In Smith's words, capturing the essence of her novel in a couple of sentences: "It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course."
While Smith's narrative energy dissipates somewhat during that latter part of the novel, "White Teeth" is still the best first novel to be published in a long time. Read it, enjoy it and look forward to many more novels from this brilliantly funny young author.
Book Review: Big screaming jazzy rag bag
Summary: 3 Stars
I began reading 'White Teeth' in my local library and was swept up instantly by the vibrant, humane and hugely comic opening. Archie Jones's thwarted suicide attempt on the Cricklewood Broadway must rank as one of the funniest openings in novel history. From then on, White Teeth expands in a great number of directions, not all of them successful. On the plus side, Zadie Smith's youthful intelligence, wit, and bubbling insight into multicultural London gives rise to a number of hillarious comic riffs on the nature of family, love, adolescence and identity. The three families that feature in the story - the Iqbals, the Jones' and the Chalfens together encapsulate great swathes of British family life. Her characters are boistrous, funny, and totally humane (no tired, postmodern cynicism here) and the dialogue is, at times, top notch, capturing the educated tones of the middle classes as well as the polyglot jabber atop the number 42 bus. There are a number of great set pieces too, delivered with the aplom of Martin Amis in novels such as 'Money' and 'London Fields'. I found the afro hair salon and the scenes in O'Connells Pool House (neither Irish, nor a pool house) especially memorable. Zadie Smith stamped her mark as a great comic satirist with this novel, and justly so.
On the downside, the whole scape came across as rather cartoonish. This is to be excused in such a young writer (Smith acknowledged this, and her writing has indeed matured, witness her Orange Prize winning effort, 'On Beauty'). An Islamic terrorist organisation with the anacroynm KEVIN comes across as goofily funny, with no real depth, and says little about the state of modern Islamism (though to be fair, White Teeth was pre September 11). Characters are Dickensian in the extreme. Everyone has a peculiarity, a funky walk, a verbal tic, a pustule here, a missing set of teeth there. The cast of White Teeth come across like actors in a zany caper film that resemble comic stereotypes rather than fully rounded characters. Ethnicity is a strong theme that is covered with great depth and insight, except in one area. What are the motivations of the white characters (such as music teacher Poppy Burt Jones) who enter the novel, fall in love with a main, Muslim character, then exit stage left as soon as structurally convenient? White Teeth may be the first novel that can be accused of having token white characters, rather than token ethnic ones.
In addition, the book strains for intellectual depth that it doesn't quite carry off. Themes of cross cultural influence, the status of the immigrant and genetic modification are hugely expansive, and Smith doesn't capture them with as much style and panoramic vision as one of her great influences, Salman Rushdie, in novels such as 'Midnight's Children', and 'The Satanic Verses'.
Still, all minor quibbles, and ones that will be ironed out as Smith develops as a writer. All in all, a hugely entertaining read. Zadie Smith is a powerhouse author who has pulled off the rare and enviable trick of writing novels that accomplish both literary merit and blockbuster sales, and White Teeth will surely last for many years as her memorable fictional debut to kick off the new Millennium.
Book Review: Disappointingly pseudo-intellectual and contrived.
Summary: 2 Stars
I wanted to like Zadie Smith as an author. The premise was so appealing; a lovely, young, multicultural authoress with the wit of Austen, realism of Kerouac, wrapped in a multicultural package. I can see why it garnered accolades and publicity; no doubt this sort of spoon-fed marketing package travels well in literary circles. How utterly disappointing.
Firstly, and no offense to anyone as I am white myself, but the large majority of people who find this book 'fantastic' are undeniably upper middle class white readers with little knowledge of any of the themes or areas Ms. Smith explores. Several reviewers brought this up, but there are LARGE inaccuracies that could've been remedied by simple research in the subject matter itself. The portrayal of various religions, ethnicity, and the like were so contrived it was laughable. A Jehovah's Witness gets sent to Catholic school? Has Ms. Smith even bothered to read ANYTHING about Jehovah's Witnesses? About the immigrants she describes? Yes, she is of mixed ethnicity and went to Cambridge - this does not make her an expert on the 'trials' of London's lower middle class. Anyone with first hand experience or knowledge of any of these subcultures of individuals would be insulted at the portrayal. Sorry, London and NYC ivory tower literati - I'm not falling for it. The hype around this book was just another example of a giant disconnect between the increasingly pop-cultured literary world and reality, which doesn't speak well of future of post post modern (or are we post post post now?) novels.
What this book seems like is the quintessential dumbing down of literature in a pseudo-intellectual package. Yes, Ms. Smith uses big words, but not in the same masterful context as Austen or the late David Foster Wallace. Her plot is uneven, themes are jumbled, and the characters seem like laughable attempts for Ms. Smith to prove her own 'roots' by combining stereotypes with cherry picked reality. In a way I see what she was trying to do, and admire the effort. She is not a poor writer, just not a strong one.
The major problem with this book is in line with what Barthes addressed in "Death of the Author". This book would never have been published, or at the most generous been published without much fanfare, without the hype around Ms. Smith's age and appearance. As a result, the overall message seems to be more about upholding the author's media image rather than about the substance of the book itself. Even the majority of reviews on Amazon which give it 4 and 5 stars reference her age, which is again disappointing. Better writers than this exist in this age group; MANY authors begin publishing novels in their 20's, in modern and historic times. I question whether the same reviewers would have thought so favorably of this novel had the initial marketing barrage on the author been nonexistent.
To summarize: it's not a terrible book, it's just not great. Or even good, really. There are better young writers out there, perhaps not with such skilled PR reps, but with greater talent. To anyone giving this more than 3.5 stars, I call your bluff. The emperor has no clothes.
Book Review: Grudging Respect
Summary: 4 Stars
This massive first novel is both wildly ambitious and desperately in need of the hand of an assured editor. Smith certainly isn't afraid to stir such minor topics as race, colonialism, class, gender, culture, religion, fate, sexuality, history and science into her melting pot examination of identity, and as such, it's one of those books whose plot cannot be succinctly outlined. In the broadest possible terms, the book revolves around Archie and Samad, an Englishman and Bangladeshi respectively, who are in the same tank unit in World War II. After spending a goodly chunk of time on their wartime experience, the book covers both the next 45 years of their lives (lengthy stops are made in the late '60s, '70s, and '80s), and with the past (flashbacks are made to mid-19th century India and Jamaica). The true protagonists are Archie's daughter Irie, and Samad's twin sons, Millat and Majid. And the central theme of the book is their struggle for identity, which is sometimes unconscious and sometimes very purposeful.One of the book's main flaws is that in addition to these five major characters, there are the mothers of each, and a veritable wagonload of important supporting characters, including a third family that appears well into the book. There's a lot of coming and going and coming, and on and on as characters assume central importance for ten pages, only to disappear for two-hundred. Smith is trying to weave a very complicated web (many critics call this aspect of the book "Dickensian"), but in doing so, the transitions become awfully jarring, and very often, annoying. A second major issue is that the characters are all types of one sort or another. Smith sets them in motion in order to comment on her grab-bag of issues, but never quite gives them enough individuality or humanity. The good thing is that she does manage to create a unique voice for each . Like Martin Amis, she's has an excellent ear for the rhythms of conversation and the specific vernaculars of both time and group. Similarly, she likes to play with language in a way that is both refreshing and assured.
On the whole, I liked this book-albeit grudgingly. Smith has taken a kind of "throw everything except the kitchen sink at the wall and see what sticks" approach, leaving no major issue unturned in her attempt to leave her mark on the reader. This means that a lot of the threads never lead anywhere, and thus the overall effect is not as strong as she might have intended. A good editor might have been able to pare some elements back a bit, allowing others to blossom more. Similarly, an editor ought to have helped with some of the many inaccuracies that crop up (two random examples: some of the portrayal of the Jehovah's Witnesses is factually incorrect, as are some of the details of Ryan's scooter). Still, as a portrait of multicultural London over the years and how the concept of "being British" has evolved in that time, it works quite well. And its questions about identity and belonging are applicable to immigrants coming to any Western country. The book was made into a 4-hour BBC miniseries, which has still never been released on video.