“...the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth



I planned on writing my full review of this book a couple days after I read it in October of 2014. I was afraid, however, if I wrote it immediately it would be too sappy, too indulgent, too full of praise. I would probably just go on and on and you all might think I was in love or something. So, like I am want, I put the review off -- meaning to get to it -- and here I am finally writing about the book almost two years after I first read it. I don't know if the delay points more towards my sometimes best laid plans falling and failing, or my anal need to complete the circle and check things off lists.

Seriously, the book was fantastic. I loved it. It was a big, hairy, kinky, ambitious first novel and Zadie Smith pulled it off. I'm not sure why I'm reading so many novels (McTeague) concerned with dentistry and teeth lately. A bit weird. Anyway, enough!

I'm glad I waited, however, because Zadie Smith seems to posses for England that same fresh breath that Lin-Manuel Miranda exhibits with his musical Hamilton. Sometimes, a place is best described by immigrants to that place. Sometimes, the change that happens to a city or nation because of immigrants is hard to measure in the first couple years. Just look at London now. London has elected its first Muslim mayor. This has more to do with some of the huge demographic changes than with a super-multiculturalism in London, but it still isn't nothing.

I remember reading a short article in the Guardian a while back that pointed out that in regards to Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh, “the three groups share many areas in common, but the Punjabi Sikhs in Southall and southeast London, the Gujarati Hindus in northwest London, and the Bengali Muslims in Tower Hamlets stand out most of all.” (The Guardian). I loved realizing the London of Pepys, Dickens and Shakespeare was now a completely different place. It was a place where the colonized were becoming the colonizers. It was a giant geography of Karma, and not in a bad way. We often never fully grasp the bad and the good and the unintended of our decisions and policies. I'm pretty damn sure Queen Victoria and those who advised her and followed her -- NEVER saw this coming as they began the British Raj.


I love how 'White Teeth' swirls and dances and dervishes with ideas of race, identity, and religious antagonism. The book is a fiction, of course, but the competition between ethnicities, even while the white majority loses their shit is not fiction. Even though 'White Teeth' debuted as the 21st century was dawning, it painted a fictionalized but very real novel about the struggles America, England, and Europe are going through right now. Think of Europe and America's reaction to Muslim refugees, the hostility of the right to Barack Obama citizenship and race, the fear that drives the radical right agendas from Hungary to Norway as Western Europe and Western Civilization loses (gradually) their majority lock on political and demographic power. When the mayor of London and the President of the United States of America wouldn't have been allowed to eat in the same high-brow London and New York clubs as presidents and mayors did 60-years-ago, it is kinda amazing to see how far we've come. However, it is also humbling when you read blogs, comments, and hell, just watch Trump on Fox News. There is a certain shaded infinity of how far we still need to go.

Anyway, back to 'White Teeth'. The brilliance of this book is Zadie Smith addresses all of this with humor, beauty and narrative magic. She avoids the twin traps of triviality and preachiness. She spins a fascinating yarn that entertains while pushing the reader to grapple with the realities that were faced by Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal in 1945, and the realities we faced when Obama was elected, and the problems we all currently face.

Fundamentally, I believe, things become a lot simpler when we can view people as individuals. Viewing Zadie Smith as an individual it is easy to see her brilliance, her potential, and her ability from her first book to play with the big boys of English fiction. The future is already here and Zadie Smith is just waiting for history and the rest of us to catch up.

Dnf at 100 pages

More (now) than fifteen years ago, when I read this, I thought it was the best contemporary fiction I'd read in ages. Even though I don't remember a whole lot of the story, I'm still in accord with that memory. It's one of the contemporary novels that I can see myself reading again in the future, or at least sampling.



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Previous review: What Uncle Sam Really Wants Chomsky
Next review: Border Crossing
More recent review: My Brilliant Friend

Previous library review: Strumpet City
Next library review: Brick Lane

The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Zadie Smith and her debut novel White Teeth. Published in 2000, this is an acclaimed book I wanted to love and understand most of, in the way I'd love a badge for David Foster Wallace or Salman Rushdie. No book is for everyone, though. By the 10% mark, I had started skimming. By 20%, I surrendered. Smith's talent in language arts is evident opening this book up to any page and blindly pointing at any paragraph. What's absent is story, as well as a character who wanted something and had obstacles put in her way.

White Teeth is a novel I felt I could skip five pages without missing anything other than writing. Smith is as active as Simone Biles cartwheeling all over each and every page: inventive writing, colorful writing, bold writing, witty writing, triple axle writing. I was delighted initially, then reached a point where I wanted all that leaping around to stop and the story to start. I've enjoyed novels where the author pointed her writing out, reminded the reader they were reading a novel, but always because there was a compelling story. Smith writes about one character, and then another character, and then and then and then ... Wondering how this might've happened, I only had to research how old Smith was when she wrote this book. Case closed.

Zadie Smith was born in the working class suburb of Willesden in northwest London in 1975. Her mother emigrated to the U.K. from Jamaica in 1969 and married an Englishman thirty years her senior. Smith, who changed her name from Sadie to "Zadie" at fourteen, was fond of tap dancing and jazz singing but deemed writing to be a more attainable career path. She graduated from King's College, Cambridge with a degree in English, several short stories published in the college literary collection and a novel, White Teeth, which she was offered a six-figure advance on when she was 21. Its critical and commercial success made Smith an international literary sensation. She lives in Kilburn, London with her husband and two children.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith
-- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier
-- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman
-- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw

ვაჰ, არ მეგონა ნამდვილად თუ ასეთი წიგნი მქონდა სახლში და რატომღაც ვარიდებდი თავს (კაიჰო, 848 ფურცლის გამო

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I loved the sly sarcasm and wry humor. The farcical characters also rang with deep humanity. The plot was creative, not a rehash of an over told story. The prose was excellent, strong, luminous enabling the characters and story to shine rather than pointing to the author’s self-identified cleverness.

Hit me between the eyes and then some! A saga about three families from three different cultures over three generations. It's primarily about the way that the past can come back when you least suspect it. Also overall it is a life-affirming book, not only for humanity but for fiction itself. This is the deserving legacy of the great works written before this.
The ~"one of the most talked about fictional debuts ever review quotes - is spot on!

Just wow. This is the amazing debut of Zadie Smith, and for me it is an instant modern classic. The word 'genius' springs to mind. Outstanding. A very strong Four star 9.5 out of 12 read. Sorry, but I had to drop this GIF for a review of White Teeth :)

2010 read

Una lettura impegnativa e stimolantissima suggerita nell'altrettanto stimolante bookclub animato da millennials a cui sono stato benevolmente ammesso.

Si rimane ammirati da quanto ha potuto produrre a vent'anni la Smith. Un libro ambizioso che centra con chirurgica precisione (l'ha pubblicato nel 2000) tante tendenze che si sarebbero conclamate nel ventennio successivo: i fondamentalismi religiosi, il rifiuto dell'autorità scientifica, il ripiegamento nella propria impotenza della (sedicente) borghesia liberal-progressista, la radicalizzazione delle seconde e terze generazioni di immigrati. Un paesaggio nel quale abbiamo imparato a muoverci che Zadie intravede con preveggente lucidità.

Facciamo un po' di mente locale: nell'ultimo decennio del ventesimo secolo eravamo lì tutti a festeggiare che il muro di Berlino era venuto giù, non c'erano più cattivi (l'11 settembre era di là da venire e ci si compiaceva vedere i russi bere coca cola), in Europa si iniziava a circolare a piacimento e fra poco si sarebbe avuta anche la moneta unica. Che vita comoda per la pacifica e ricca Europa.
L'unica preoccupazione era il baco del millennio che minacciava di rovinarci il nuovo trastullo con cui ci si iniziava a divertire.

Sappiamo com'è andata e la ventenne Zadie l'aveva già sgamato. chapeau.

Certo ho trovato molti difetti nell'organizzazione della gran mole di materia narrativa. Alcuni personaggi (Archie e consorte) vengono preannunciati in pompa magna, e poi quasi abbandonati, l'inciso della nascita dell'amicizia tra Samad ed Archie in un improbabile episodio della seconda guerra mondiale l'ho trovato un corpo estraneo, tutto sommato deleterio perchè comporta il fatto che entrino nel cuore dell'azione incontrando le anime gemelle (che potrebbero essere ampiamente figlie loro) e mettendo al mondo eredi a quasi 60 anni. Vabbè sospensione dell'incredulità, ma non serviva proprio.

Ma fosse stata capace di far quadrare tutto, avrebbe scritto un Underworld (che DeLillo ha scritto a 60 anni ,mentre la Zadie non ne ha neanche 50 oggi), per cui: brava così leggerò dell'altro.

Rating: 3.5

Hilariously complex characters. It's insane to think Zadie was practically my age when she began writing this book. How she pulled off accurately depicting 3 different cultures is beyond me, but she did it with wit and grit.

By no means is the book perfection, but it is wonderful. I assure you, it's unlike anything you've ever read. There is an air of confidence Zadie writes with which I loved. The story overall is funny but it does deal with complex topics such as culture clash, identity crisis, immigrant experiences, parenting etc. Thankfully the dialogue makes it easy to get through quick. (I took a decade bc I was reading it off/on).

My only issue was the ending, it climaxed then fell into a mush of nothingness for me. Maybe it's just me not grasping the ending, maybe it is clever in an odd way BUT I JUST DIDN'T GET IT. If the book closed off better, this would've been a 5 star read for me.

I definitely would recommend this to others!

Reading this again reminds me how readers wedded to traditional story structure will be closed off to other excellent books: Infinite Jest, The Master & Margarita, Blood Meridian, and even Don Quixote. They expect novels to conform to formula and are easily confused if they don't. But, of course, it's the author's fault, every time, right?

White Teeth by Zadie Smith tells the story of the turbulent interaction of three dysfunctional families living in England: an Englishman, his Jamaican wife, and their daughter; a couple from Bengal and their twin boys; and an English couple, Joyce and Marcus Chalfen, and their children. Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, who served together in the military, link the first two families. The Chalfens are drawn into the foray through the children.

Smith vividly details the internal and external conflicts plaguing the families. There are the obvious generational conflicts and the conflicts between the colonizer and the colonized. Additionally, the immigrant parents and their children struggle to locate themselves in a culture that is racist and exclusionary. Samad Iqbal wages and ultimately loses the battle to instill in his children pride in their culture and adherence to their religion. Meanwhile his wife, Alsana, constantly undermines and ridicules him. Irie, the daughter of Archie and his Jamaican wife, Clara, struggles with her identity and exhibits signs of internalized racism. Add into the mix an Iqbal son who becomes radicalized; a Jehovah’s witness grandmother; a lesbian cousin; an English woman (Joyce Chalfen) disguising her unwholesome obsession with the handsome, young Millat Iqbal in the garb of “I’m only trying to help him;” her husband incurring the wrath of religious communities for performing genetic experiments on a mouse; stir the pot gently with the struggle for cultural and racial identities, sprinkle generously with institutionalized racism, derogatory language and behaviors, and one begins to get an inkling of the abundant story-lines in the novel. Smith skillfully weaves the disparate threads together uniting them in the crescendo of the final scene.

Two qualities in the novel are particularly impressive. The first is Smith’s uncanny ability to capture the dialect, intonation, accent, and diction of each of her characters to reflect their ethnicity, racial heritage, and age group. Smith has an impressive ear for replicating the ebb and flow and pacing of dialog so much so that one can almost overhear the conversations and easily recognize the speaker. But even though some of her characters may share the same cultural heritage, they don’t necessarily express the same concerns. Each emerges as a fully rounded, well-developed, flesh and blood individual with a unique personality and distinct voice.

The second impressive quality lies in the voice of the omniscient narrator—sharp, witty, funny, and perceptive. The novel is replete with instances of laugh out loud hilarity. The narrator pokes fun at her characters, punctures their grandiose, ostensible motives for pursuing a course of action or embracing a cause when their real motives usually have to do with feelings of guilt and/or sexual desire. There are plenty of asides to the reader as invitations to share the joke. But while we may laugh at the quirky personalities and their dilemmas, what emerges is the narrator’s love for her characters in spite of—or maybe because of—their struggles, their foibles, their weaknesses, their delusions, and their search for belonging—in other words, those very qualities that make us all human.

White Teeth is an engaging, funny, entertaining, and well-crafted multi-cultural novel with true-to-life dialog and flawed characters stepping off its pages in all their richness and diversity.

Highly recommended.

I'm about a decade late to Zadie Smith's White Teeth, one of those books friends recommended or I picked up at the library then put back and moved on to a different title. My reticence to read the novel revolved around the plethora of book-clubby texts that could best be classified as “somewhat patronizing novels about other cultures featuring triumph in the face of great poverty and hardship.” I hate these books. But White Teeth turns out be an example of where those novels fail and a sun-surface hot writer can embrace the complexity inherent in both the smaller and larger narratives of multiple generations. Zadie Smith's talent and enthusiasm are tangible; she writes like she's bouncing up and down in her seat.

White Teeth is as much about inertia as free will. Samad and Archie, brought together by their bad luck and questionable soldiering circumstances, spend much of their time in a decrepit English pub. Archie marries a Jamaican woman he meets on a stairway at a stranger's New Year's Day party. Samad's wife, Alsana, and Archie's wife, Clara, form a careful friendship. The friends' children are first-generation English carrying histories and expectations; Samad and Alsana's twin boys and Archie and Clara's daughter inhabit the no man's land between tradition and the present that, really, is everyone's land. Questions of loyalty, tradition, and identity emerge in the flash of conflict and creaking, inevitable societal evolution. As Alsana notes, circumstances emerge in which people are involved, to use her word, without intention but without question. When the two families encounter the white, affluent Chalfens, the cheeriest, most cluelessly evil parents I may have ever encountered in literature, twin brothers reunite (or at least occupy the same country), and the book's last hundred pages race to a thriller-esque ending that, while not tying every loose end, left me feeling as if I had read a singular, satisfying novel. Smith doesn't rely on easy, obvious immigration issues to drive White Teeth; she goes much deeper into characters' minds and families without preaching.

I hope I'm not making White Teeth sound pious. In fact, I would argue Smith wrote the novel in part as a reaction to the piety that obscures truthful narrative. She builds each character from the ground up and knows when to move from one to the next. I'm also not sure if I understood every metaphorical nuance; I'm not English, Bengali, Muslim, or a Jehovah's Witness, all elements intrinsic to the storyline, so I most likely missed symbolic elements. While I don't want to minimize the immigrant experience, white readers, I believe, feel some of the same vertigo as the characters when navigating a landscape with different cultural touchstones, e.g. signs in Polish and Korean up and down Chicago's Milwaukee Avenue. Zadie Smith doesn't praise or criticize these landscapes. She focuses on the fear and hope inherent in characters' reactions to the stimuli. The players can't control the landscape as much as accept and respond to it. This is a sprawling, well-structured novel. White Teeth is a near-masterwork, the best book I've ever read about different cultures' slow, tectonic plate-like creep past, toward, and into each other.