White Teeth: A Novel
by Zadie Smith
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Book Reviews of White Teeth: A Novel
Book Review: the funniest book I've read
Summary: 5 Stars
"White Teeth" confidently depicts the experience of living in multi-ethnic London, a city that functions in 300 languages. The book traces the lives and relationships of two British families living there from the `70's to the millennium. One family (the Iqbals) is Muslim from Bangladesh. The other (the Jones) mixes Jamaican and white British working-class; this family's grandmother is a Jehovah's Witness. A third family of white British intellectuals (the Chalfens) is introduced halfway through the book; its religion is Itself.
Set mainly in north-west London (Willesden, Cricklewood, and Kilburn), the book courses its way through more than 20 other areas of the city. Its humble settings include a halal butcher's shop, a marriage registry in Ludgate Hill, a hair-straightening salon in Kilburn, an Indian restaurant off Leicester Square, a commune in Queens Park and a dingy Irish pub that's run by Iraqis but later agrees to display a picture of a Bangla ancestor-hero to make one of its longest customers feel respected. External symbols of London and definitions of `Britishness' are changing.
Internally, the families' members feel a loss of control over their lives' directions. They're caught between two worlds, alienated by both. They struggle with fatherless upbringings, religious adherence and identity crises while trying to absorb and reflect what's good or demanded of a Western lifestyle while rejecting what's bad about it. What always was 'right' now seems 'wrong' or no longer works. Misjudgments must be endured practically and spiritually.
Through the dilemmas of her characters, the author questions the usefulness of tradition to the formation of culture. She illustrates how repeated racist violence pushes victims towards fundamentalist beliefs and action. At a time when there is no reliable guidepost to deal with daunting modern issues, she allows us to laugh at them.
My one complaint is the book's ending. Its `twist' is confusing, tenuous, irrelevant and unneeded.
Although written pre-9/11, I think the book accurately represents how London still feels now. As Smith said in interviews, her goal was to portray the big picture of life in London. She accomplished that on a grand scale.
If you have finished the book, you may want to look at a recent article entitled, "Zadie didn't tell the real race story". Published in `The Sunday Times' on February 19, 2006, it reports a negative opinion of "White Teeth" by one Ziad Haider Rahman. He purportedly served as Smith's inspiration for the character of Majid; his younger brother, Jimmi, was a model for Millat. Haider says that Smith distorted the true state of British race relations and whitewashed his anger towards the racist attacks he suffered there. (Obiously, those attacks did not actually obstruct his gaining a good living there!)
Book Review: 5 stars for the beginning, 3 stars for the rest
Summary: 4 Stars
The beginning of Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth is marked by an extraordinary voice: confident, affectionate, satiric, witty. Archibald Jones attempts to kill himself in a car outside a Muslim butchery while pigeons fleeing from the murderous butcher leave streaks of purple excrement across his windshield. Archie's life is spared by the irate butcher because ". . .dying's no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things to Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick." This irreverent, comic beginning launches the novel into Archie's life and into that of his best friend Samad Iqbal. Archie, given a new chance at life, marries the much younger Clara, the daughter of a Jamaican Jehovah Witness mother and a passive, emotionally absent father, while Samad, who is always striving to be a good Muslim, enters into an arranged marriage with Alsana, a woman who was not even born while he fought alongside Archie during World War II. Their children - Irie Jones and the twins Millat and Magrid Iqbal - struggle to find their niche in their overwhelming white British surroundings. If Smith had left her novel at that, at exploring the cultural rifts that divide the families and their cultures, this book would have succeeded admirably; however, the author departs from this course to explore a world that contains a snobbishly intellectual English family, genetic engineering, radical Islam, and the end of the world as predicted by the Jehovah Witnesses. While these separate plots often serve as metaphors for the struggle to assimilate, they simply don't do enough to engage the reader. The result is a tedious, wholly unfunny second half. Characterizations that were done so well in the beginning become lost in the noise of the rest, making it difficult to care about what happens to Smith's inventions. Plot turns begin to feel forced, and reactions, unnatural. Most disappointingly, the witty voice of the narrator fades into the background, and is never as strong as it is in the first hundred pages.
The novel owes much to the literary tradition of Victorians such as Dickens and Thackeray, who wrote sweeping novels with comic and/or biting wit. Smith's range is impressive for a first-time novelist, but her skills and literary instincts are not yet honed enough to carry off the sprawl of such a complex concept. Despite this, her descriptions and characterizations are first-rate, even if they get lost among the rest, and her turns of prose can be astonishing.
This is one of those rare instances when I find it difficult to rate a book using the five star system. White Teeth is an ambitious, unconventional novel that ultimately tries to be too much. Readers who want to keep up on literary trends and celebrities will want to read this, since there is much to admire in Smith's work.
Book Review: What a brilliant web we weave...
Summary: 5 Stars
The negative reactions to this book made me think about why I love it. It may seem scattered, and random, with the ending being completely dependent on coincidence. But how different is that from real life? This book looks at its characters from the outside inwards, whereas we see our lives from a very narrow viewpoint, one that we define, and from the inside outwards -- that's the advantage of an omniscient narrator. There are many coincidences in life that we simply don't acknowledge -- think about all the stories of people of people who went to the same high school without knowing each other, then end up marrying ten years later. Even in a globalized era, our paths may appear random at the level of the individual, but the macrocosm manages to relate us all. I think the tendency for us is to assume that there is no master plan, when in fact there might be one. At that point, like Marcus Chalfen, we try to impose our own order on the world. And, like Marcus, we find that doesn't work.Another complaint I have problems with is the idea that the early characters fade towards the end of the novel. Again, how different is that from reality? Mangal Pande's shadow looms over Samad, but, effectively, the legacy is one of the major reasons Samad is never happy -- he's always in a competition with a dead guy! Samad himself has to fade for his sons to emerge. But that fading is never complete, as we see with Mr. JP Hamilton. He has a history almost completely irrelevant to Irie, Magid, and Millat, but that doesn't make his irrelevance any less tragic. We all have to overcome legacies left to us by our forebears, but annihilation of memory is never complete (or necessary.)
One problem I think people hasn't been mentioned is the prevalence of "in" jokes. I'm sure that many of the things that I find funny made no sense to a lot of people, but that says something about the relationship between sub-cultures and the wider identity of a nation. Like other readers, I was impressed with how many topics Smith was able to tackle at an intelligent level (and she's only three years older than me!)
Finally, my favorite parts of the novel is the characters. Every character is absurd, but no more absurd than real people. Archie's life revolves around a coin, Clara is a lapsed Jehovah's Witness whose ex-boyfriend is trying to lure her back to the religion she showed him, Samad struggles to confom to a religion he hates, Magid and Millat are a twin study for the ages, and Alsana should give pause to anyone who still believes that Muslim women are inherently oppressed. But, hey, aren't we all just a little whacked? We all have contradictions of character that make us just a little more imperfect or a little more human. This book captures that, but it manages not to get weighed down by the material it tackles.
Book Review: It's about the people
Summary: 5 Stars
Ok, so you've heard the hype about Zadie Smith, the "preternaturally gifted writer", the young woman who received a 750,000 pound advance on 80 pages of this book when she was only 21! You know she's dazzling and that the literary world is in love with her. So what? Don't critics get all excited about all kinds of terrible books? Aren't the people who say Zadie Smith is brilliant very likely huge fans of John Knowles's "A Separate Peace"? Yes, yes, and yes.I am not one of those people. I love intelligent, entertaining, open-minded, passionate, and beautiful books. White Teeth is all of those things and has even added a new category: meandering non-narrative gushing. Now I like that too.
I won't do plot synopsis, because you can get that elsewhere, and besides, White Teeth's plot is not relevant. It really hardly matters at all. This book is, dare I say, a character story. It's about the people, not events. Normally this is what defines "literary fiction" from "pulp fiction". In Smith's case, it's really more of a juxtaposition. Her characters aren't extraordinary. They are definitely warped, but no more than the people who live on the periphery of your own life. They are the passionate "commonfolk", like me and perhaps you as well. They are egotists and they are awful and horrible and lovable and funny and frightening and uplifting...all at different times and always believably. Zadie Smith is a writer who understands people. And clearly she loves them. Even her most irascible characters are imbued with a genuine desire for goodness, no matter how divergent their idea of goodness may be from the next person. In the post-9/11 world, this kind of disparate uniformity is very necessary. In fact, many of her characters are Muslims and a couple are even militants. Smith offers a glimpse of such a culture and compels us to love the kind people who we are being told to hate.
Smith's story is interesting only insofar as it provides more understanding of the people in the book. Most times I opened it, I felt like one who goes to a friend's house, not to do anything in particular, but just to watch the oddness and craziness of the family. The book is fun, smart, and you get the sense that its author really cares about people in a way that is refreshing in the world of literary pomposity. Most great literary achievements are all about the author, and the critics who praise Zadie Smith would like this to be no exception. In my estimation Smith diverges from earlier artistic triumphs by asserting the ascendancy of her characters above herself at each turn.
Read and savor this book, not because it's a critical success, but because it's a thing of beauty to be treasured and remembered.
Book Review: Flashes of Brilliance; Likely Not a Flash in the Pan
Summary: 3 Stars
White Teeth is more a literary romp than a structured novel. It's easy to see why people are dazzled by her prose, but make no mistake, this is a first novel...with a vengeance. Zadie Smith writes engaging dialogue for characters from an impressively diverse set of ages, interests and ethnicities. She can write an interesting riff on just about anything that strikes her fancy and make it fun. Unfortunately, random riffs do not add up to an accomplished novel, although I certainly wouldn't bet against her achieving that in the future.
One major problem is that, Smith's writerly voice is so seductive, we get into the habit of accepting her characters' rampant inconsistency. Time and again the reader is lulled into accepting incongruent behavior...only to be baffled later. Particularly unfortunate is Irie's seduction of Magid and Millat the twins who are (well, should be) so pivotal in pounding home the theme of the book. Believe me, I'm not revealing anything here. The average Creative Writing 101 course would label this crucial scene: "unprepared for," at best.
Due to their inconstancy, (Alsana seems to physically morph from a mouse to a mountain without any explanation,) Smith's characters (and eventually the novel itself,) fail to develop in a satisfying way. As the romping begins to resolve itself into some semblance of a traditional structure and Smith needs to start pulling the strands of her novel together, (~last 80 pages) White Teeth loses all momentum. At the end when the author most needs to put weight on her characters observations and beliefs, they are not there for her. The book crumbles to dust in the last chapter...a great pity for she almost pulled off her high wire act despite all the prior analysis.
The reader is pulling for Smith all the way to the end which -- I think -- explains all the 5 star reviews. As a first novel it is charming and ambitious but the truth is that it doesn't deliver on the promises made in the first chapter. Smith, famously, sold this novel on the strength of that opening volley. She then had to sit down and live up to its promise. The end of the book betrays a writer who is either rushed or exhausted or both. The economics of publishing doubtless demanded the book's publication before it was really ready.
As I write this Zadie Smith's 2nd novel has been published to painful reviews and she is reported to be attending Harvard. Nonetheless, she is likely to return to the fray and live up to all the glowing (if premature) tributes in good time. Just reduce expectations when you embark on this book or you will be disappointed by the lack of a payoff in the end.