Well, given all the hub-bub and the misogynistic criticisms and the swells of plaudits and the what-have-you, I can't say I came to Zadie Smith's landmark novel, White Teeth free of experience. I mean, I honestly had no idea what the hell it was about, but I sure knew a lot of people felt a lot of things about it. James Wood's infamous, if not myopic, review wherein he coined a new syllogism "hysterical realism" in which he parodies the likes of Pynchon, Smith, DFW, etc. setup some kind of expectation within me—that this would be a zany, paranoid fever-dream full of erudition and weird quasi-realism, etc. That's not at all what it is. Any probably all the better for it.

Instead, it's a pretty traditional familial saga about diaspora, post-colonialism, race, religion, time, the expectations we have of our children, tradition, science, extremism, fate, chance, and more. If I had to do that thing where you liken a thing to another thing that invariably isn't really an accurate comparison at all, but it works well enough that people kind of get it, I would say Zadie Smith's novel is actually more like Franzen's The Corrections but better, because there's more to it than White People Problems.

Because my expectations were in a totally different spot, it took me a few days of reading to really get bearings, because I kept looking for the odd turn, the peculiarity so buzzed about through Wood's analysis. But I then settled in, realizing that this wasn't going to be a quirky, weird trip, but a really engagingly told story of a family in the UK, living the diaspora in all its myriad variations from East to West.

Smith writes with precision, with light touches, and with humor. The book, hardly a pot-boiler is a real page turner as its chorus of voices builds to a crescendoing closing few pages where stakes have been set for 400 pages, and now, everyone's all in one room, and it's going to explode, but you just don't know how.

As soon as I realized my per-conceived notions about the book were misappropriated, I feared that the book would wear thin. It never did for me, and I really, deeply loved the characters and how their weird story of post-colonial life in England spun out. I'll be eager to read Smith's other books. And James Wood is an idiot.

i am so sorry to say this...but this was borderline unreadable for me.

the description of this book — a family saga told with humor and a wry sociopolitical eye, with the intent of capturing what it was to be a person during a certain era — got me.

but this wasn't funny, to me, or clever; it was self-indulgent and self-serious, pretentious and mocking to its characters. i never managed to like any of them (despite my lifelong tendency to like the unlikable) because the book itself, and its narrator, clearly do not.

and that, as it turns out, is a dealbreaker.

perhaps more importantly, it is rife with the type of selfish, conservative-in-leftist-clothing liberal politics that made its author write a completely stupid essay in the new yorker for exactly no one.

bottom line: this review — not funny but kind of trying to be, extremely self-important, and pointless reading — mirrors its subject!

This was excellent - funny, readable, thought-provoking and moving. Having now read all 4 of Zadie Smith's novels in reverse order, I think this one is the best, though "On Beauty" comes close. Beyond that I can't say much that hasn't been said before by wiser heads than mine.

White Teeth is an expansive, detailed, and beautifully written attempt to encapsulate the social chaos that blossoms at the bridging of generational, national and sexual mindsets. It reminds me very much of the freeflowing histories written by Marquez and Allende, as well as Salman Rushdie's strange little one-off treatise on cultural alienation, Fury. (Samad, in particular, reminds me quite a bit of Fury's Malik Solanka.)

Smith does many things well. She has a serious ear for dialogue and accent, she knows how to manage the flow and pacing of a story, and she's quite skilled at employing large concepts (genetic manipulation, immigrant psychology, the concept of history itself) both as fact and as metaphor. Her cast of characters is varied and nearly every one of them comes off as a fully flesh and blood human being. However, it's in terms of these personalities that I feel she makes her biggest misstep.

Zadie Smith is what I'd call an Ironist. I don't mean this in the Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Jon Stewart sense. I don't mean that she's a comedian. I mean it in the sense that the territory she stands on--that her narrator in White Teeth stands on--is one whose boundaries are staked out in terms of what she is not. My friend Brandon commented below that Smith shows "blatant contempt for every character except the one who is clearly based on the author." While I understand where he's coming from, I don't think it's contempt per se. On the contrary, I think Smith has deep feelings for most of her characters--even the more despicable ones like Crispin and Millat. I think that what Brandon interprets as contempt is something far more ambiguous: let's call it detached superiority.

The Ironist defines herself through the process of over-defining others. Every character in this novel is over-defined, over-drawn. While this provides us with a great, at times excruciating level of detail, it also paints each of them into a kind of cage wherein all of their actions are predictable. Each of them has a sort of "final vocabulary" (cf. Rorty) that defines the limits of what they might do or say--the doctrines of Islam and the Watchtower Society, of PETA or clinical science. In the worst cases, their adherence to these vocabularies allows Smith to slip them into easy "types" (see: Mr. Topps, Crispin, Joshua, Marcus, the various members of FATE). Smith creates her authorial/narrative identity--what's called a metastable personality--by passively proving that she is not limited by such a final vocabulary, and that in escaping their confines she has a broader, more comprehensive view of the social workings of the world. This is, generally speaking, the goal of any omniscient narrator, but the way that Smith goes about writing this one in particular imparts a certain sense of smugness (the parenthetical asides to the reader, the knowing winks, the jokes at the expense of easy targets) that isn't always present.

The metastable personality is the natural reaction to uncomfortability with final vocabularies, but it itself is of course just as self-defining as any of them (albeit in the opposite direction). It instinctually yearns for instability, but prefers to admire chaos from afar rather than living in it. The metastable personality knows that in order to maintain coherence it must remain stable, and that the only way to remain stable is to balance itself on the disbelief of all known final vocabularies. Smith writes off worldview after worldview, but is of course unable to articulate her own because her own is simply the absence of adherence to any such worldview.

This isn't so much a criticism of Smith's work as it is an explanation of why it is the way it is, and why it can be read as contempt.

Oh Zadie Smith be still my beating heart! I devoured this fabulous novel. Smith is truly a master of plot and her ability to capture the voices of each individual character is inspirational. Never before have I read a novel which such a rich and diverse dramatis personae. I fear that this review is going to become a list of superlatives so I'll quell it here by saying, I loved this and I need to read more Smith now.

“Dentes Brancos” é uma obra poderosa, carregada de significados impossíveis de decifrar numa única passagem. É uma obra imensamente rica porque pede não mera reflexão mas diálogo em busca dos significados pretendidos e dos que cada um de nós leu, interpretou e sentiu. Mas não sendo eu grande fã de simbolismos, ou melhor das ultrainterpretações a que dão azo, tenho de dizer que aquilo que primeiro me seduziu em Zadie Smith foi a sua escrita, que Quinn muito bem definiu no New York Times como: “exuberante pirotecnia verbal”.

[para ler a análise com imagens e links, aceder a https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/...]

Pela sua qualidade estilística Zadie está na, minha, galeria de escritores ao lado de Jonathan Franzen e Philip Roth, embora para a maioria da imprensa esteja ao lado de Salman Rushdie. Impressionando, impacta verdadeiramente quando percebemos que “Dentes Brancos“, primeira obra, foi publicada em Janeiro de 2000, quando tinha 24 anos, e segue quando descobrimos que esta surge de um primeiro manuscrito datado de 1997, com 21 anos, que lhe valeu um contrato em redor das 250,000 libras. A idade impressiona, e houve quem qualificasse Zadie como uma daquelas crianças hiperativas que se revela cedo demais, correndo o risco de se perder no futuro, mas em 2017 sabemos que tal profecia não se concretizou, Zadie publicou desde então mais 4 romances, um dos quais, “Uma Questão de Beleza”, já aqui dei conta antes com nota máxima. Impressiona-me particularmente já que Zadie nasceu um ano depois de mim, o que me dá uma perspectiva muito próxima do que terá sido necessário para atingir este nível. Zadie é talento em bruto, mas não chega, o qualificativo de hiperatividade não é descabido, já que foi preciso investir muito do seu tempo em leitura, em introspeção e escrita. Produzir um texto desta magnitude com vinte e poucos anos não está ao alcance de muitos de nós, pode faltar talento mas falta acima de tudo o amor e a dedicação que Zadie depositou na literatura.

Em termos temáticos Zadie usa “Dentes Brancos” para ir ao fundo das complexidades familiares, raciais, colonizadoras e culturais da Inglaterra contemporânea. E se o livro terá impactado em 2000, o Brexit em 2017 veio tornar ainda mais relevante tudo o que nele se discute. Temos numa mesma narrativa, mais de 150 anos de história, três gerações e várias ex-colónias britânicas. A Jamaica, o Bangladesh e a Índia são chamados para a mesa inglesa, e o diálogo torna-se explosivo, multicolorido, dando a conhecer a essência da multiculturalidade. Zadie introduz temas como a 2ª Guerra Mundial, a eugenia, as religiões, a ciência, o livre-arbítrio, o suicídio, colocando toda uma constelação de personagens a questionar o propósito da vida. O propósito é aquilo que torna o resumo do livro tão difícil, e os personagens tão diversos e realistas podem afastar-nos mas Zadie usa uma forma inteligente de nos aproximar de tudo e todos, o "humor sério". Não sendo eu grande apreciador de comédia, tenho de dizer que ri, gargalhadas espontâneas, imensas vezes ao longo da leitura, com o modo como tratando assuntos sérios e complexos, os personagens, cada um dotado das suas lógicas e crenças culturais, questionam o mundo.

Todas estas temáticas só são possíveis pelo contexto que envolve Zadie, as suas raízes. Filha de mãe negra, imigrada em 1969 da Jamaica para Inglaterra, e de pai branco britânico, em segundo casamento. Com dois meios-irmãos e dois irmãos mais novos, e uma adolescência marcada pelo divórcio dos pais, que a levou a mudar o seu nome original, de Sadie para Zadie. Este contexto parece ter servido de ebulição à criatividade que viria a demonstrar na universidade, no King's College em Cambridge, onde daria nas vistas com pequenos contos, e conseguiria então captar o interesse para um contrato de primeira obra.

Voltando ao início, o livro está carregado de símbolos. Não são necessários decifrar para se compreender a história, para se sentir prazer na leitura, mas instigam-nos a ir mais fundo, assim como separam o livro do mero historiar de aventuras familiares de raças diferentes. Elevam o sentido da leitura e explicam porque a literatura continua tão relevante enquanto arte, já que consegue não apenas fazer-nos passar bons momentos, mas ao mesmo tempo ensinar-nos, contribuindo para o edificar da nossa base civilizacional.

E assim, mesmo não sendo particularmente fã da ultrainterpretação simbólica, não quero deixar de destacar aqui o sentido do título da obra. Como disse, existe muito mais nas páginas do livro, tal como o RatoFuturo, o KEVIN, ou o Dr. Doença, que poderiam por si dar origem a páginas e páginas de reflexões, e que terão já dado múltiplas teses de mestrado. Mas porquê “Dentes Brancos”? Tenho de confessar que as ideias que passo a explorar não são originariamente minhas, surgiram de várias leituras (ligações: a, b, c, d, e), que me permitiram, como disse por via do diálogo e confrontação de ideias, chegar uma interpretação que satisfez a minha leitura e o meu mundo.

Os “Dentes Brancos” surgem ao longo do livro várias vezes, mas sem conotações concretas, do impacto visual dos seus estragos (uma personagem não tem todos os dentes da frente), contrastando-se com o excessivo cuidado na sua limpeza (um dos personagens lava os dentes 5 a 6 vezes por dia). Como se os dentes tivessem uma relevância de classe, capaz de marcar a diferença de cultura e até de raça. Contudo, o mais significativo não surge nas páginas, temos de chegar lá por analogia, pela construção discursiva que nos une. Sendo um texto defensor do multiculturalismo, o que costumamos dizer é que a cor da pele na conta porque debaixo da mesma, corre o mesmo sangue vermelho. Ora dentro das nossas bocas estão também os mesmos dentes brancos, iguais para todos mas ao mesmo tempo diferentes, tão diferentes que são usados para identificar os restos mortais de corpos muito deteriorados. Ou seja, na igualdade podemos encontrar a diferença, e juntas contribuem para definir aquilo que somos. Não somos apenas iguais nem apenas diferentes, somos singulares, e por isso é fundamental preservar e acarinhar as raízes, as mesmas que garantem o branco dos nossos dentes.


Análise publicada no VI
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/...

Wow, what a lot to take in! I won't even attempt to summarise this sprawling, densely-plotted novel - suffice to say that it traces the history of two multicultural London families at the tail end of the 20th century. Along the way themes such as race relations, religious extremism, immigration, and even the ethics of genetic engineering are explored, all with an intoxicating energy and a sparkling sense of humour.

The aspect of the book I admired most was its focus on family. Both the Iqbal and Jones clans are dysfunctional in their own way - obstacles such as marital infidelity and fundamentalism serve to threaten the family unit. Continents may divide them, conflicting ideologies might drive them apart but there is a familial bond that will never break and an unconditional love for one another that will always exist (even though they may be slow to admit this at times).

The story is dizzying in scope and though are numerous plot threads to tie up, it all comes together in an immensely satisfying finale. It blows my mind that Zadie Smith had written White Teeth by the age of 24. Little wonder that she took the literary world by storm.

Zadie Smith has been hugely celebrated for this book and others, and WHITE TEETH is the first I have read by her. It is a multi-generational/multi-ethnic/multi-themed tome of a book, and though two months or so have passed since I finished it, I am still not quite certain how I feel about it.
One one hand, Smith is brilliant at sketching out characters. They are larger-than-life, and yet incredible human. The whole novel is permeated with a sense of heightened reality, that everything could be true, but is taken just a step too far.
The book tells the story of Brit Archie and his Bengali friend, Samad, and later of their children. The story is set in London, a place so alive and varied, it is practically a character in itself, and was a perfect choice by Smith. I liked the part of the book which focused on Archie and Samad, who are very memorable, particularly the latter, in that they are almost caricatures of themselves or the roles they are meant to fill.
The story lost me a bit after about two-thirds, when it veered into so many directions, and focused on the second generation. I didn't much care about any of the characters, at this point, and the story was too all-over-the-place, like lots of loose and electric wires which are never satisfactorily untangled.
Despite these gripes, it is a worthwhile read in that it brings up issues that are relevant today still. Smith does not shy away from uglier, controversial topics and throws up questions regarding race, identity, purpose, religion, which most people probably consider at some point or another in their lives. I think I would have preferred this book to have been two volumes, and I might have read only the first one about Archie and Samad.
Nonetheless, I can see myself keeping an eye on this author and what else she has on offer.

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com

A multi-generational, multi-ethnic story of two (three, if you count the Chalferns who come in later) families in England during the last quarter of the 20th century. I have to admit I laughed a lot and looked forward to being entertained each time I sat down with this giant tome, for each morsel was interesting, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Archie (English) & Samad (Bengali) are two war-time buddies who marry women a whole generation younger than them. Archie’s wife Clara is Jamaican and their daughter is Irie who hates her kinky hair and wishes to straighten it at any cost. Samad’s wife Alsana is Bengali and their identical twins are Majid and Millat. Yet this particular egg split differently, for Magid is the intellectual and Millat the emotional one. And the entire premise of the novel splits along the divide between intellect and faith, and the characters align themselves in either side of this schism. To widen the crevasse, Samad, trying to keep one of his marital indiscretions secret, packs Majid off to be educated in Bangladesh and keeps Millat at home, only to see the former emerge a pukka sahib and the latter wind up a religious radical. Enter the Chalferns: Jewish, liberal, academic and open minded, a family that adopts Millat and Irie to teach them proper English values after the two teenagers are busted for marijuana possession in school. The plot thickens and deepens as Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic radicals, and animal activists are thrown into the mix, along with the fact that Mr. Chalfern, with the help of Majid, is into the genetic engineering of mice, a concept that the religious Samad and Millat are fundamentally opposed to. Without giving more of the plot away, I will say that the allegiances and shift and sway, as this group of motley souls look for identity and purpose in their lives. A series of secondary conflicts arise throughout the book: black vs. white, husband vs. wife, parent vs. child, immigrant vs. native-born, war-time vs. post war generation.

No one is spared by Smith’s satirical omniscient narrator: Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, black and whites. The narrator also conceals vital information that is revealed later for more dramatic impact—sometimes 400 pages later, when one has forgotten the incident in this incident-packed story. I was reminded of Salman Rushdie, who has also taken an unsparing approach to laying bare the ills, prejudices and traumas of visible minorities in England. Smith has not faced the consequences that Rushdie faced, but she skirts some thin ice especially in parodying those ethnic and religious groups that take offence easier than others. Smith however, shows masterful control of the disparate story strands by bringing all the characters and the various interest groups into one place for a much anticipated finale on New Year’s Eve 1992. If I have to level one criticism at this novel, it is that the much expected “explosive ending” didn’t quiet happen.

Notwithstanding this last grouse, I highly recommend this book, a truly phenomenal debut effort.

The last time I read a book with this much narrative confidence, power and authority was back in January when I tackled Midnight’s Children.

It's rare that a book comes with a voice this strong. Like Rushdie’s novel, Smith creates a present that is pervaded by the past. Her characters are very aware of their ancestry, and they really struggle to reconcile with it in the modern world. Are they Indians? Are they British? Are they black or white? Or are they a little bit of everything? Because of their duality, they struggle to find themselves in the modern metropolis. They don’t quite know who they should be, so they cling to and project ideas they are far removed from. And it’s all a little tragic, to see such confusion.

n  “...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.” n

Every character Smith has conjured up here could be someone you’d encounter in real life; they are all very real people and they are faced with some very real problems. However, the issue I had with the novel is that we simply do not stay with them for long enough for them to develop. We glimpse them, nothing more. I’d even hesitate to actually call this a novel; it’s more like four loosely related novellas slapped together with a very small amount of glue to bind them. It’s close on collapsing.

As such, this doesn’t have a plot per say. It’s more like four separate character studies. And it does work to an extent; it captures a large part of the contemporary space, but as a novel it feels fragmented with little to no cohesion. Some sections were better than others, with characters who were more flawed and interesting to read about. To make this a little clearer, I feel like I need to write four seperate reviews in order to talk about his book properly and rate each section differently.

I’m not going to do that, but I hope you get my point; it’s quite a difficult book to talk about because it doesn’t feel like a normal book. Smith followed a similar model in NW but that came together as it captured the city is what trying so hard to evoke whereas this feels very much apart. I can see why many other users on here have chosen not to rate it.

n  It's a very powerful debut, but I did not enjoy all of it. A mixed bag for me. n

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So my computer has been out of commission for the past few weeks and that partly explains my absence from goodreads (insert excuse about being busy, being outdoors in the summer, etc). I recently joined up with all the cool kids and dropped a hundred dollars for an iPhone and I've been trying to make do with the limitations imposed by the less than satisfactory goodreads app which I guess is better than trying to navigate the site through safari on the phone but alas, I digress. Because the reason I'm willing to sit through the inconvenience of text-typing out this small something of a review is because this book is the shiz and I would think that anyone anywhere would find something to enjoy within the pages of this wondrous book. Of course there are a number of negative reviews on this site and I wonder if this book suffered from the over-hype-backlash syndrome that has claimed the lives of so many modern classics. And you're probably saying "woah woah, what is this modern classic clap trap? Aren't you just hyping up this book already?" Probably. But please, allow me to try to win over your cold cynical hearts:

--do you enjoy the prose stylizings and authorial wit of David Foster Wallace? Then there might be something similar in style and tone in this book for you.

--are you frustrated by the lack of female and/or minority representation in popular literature? Yup yup, read read.

--are you the type of person who tends to take on the "fly-on-the-wall" persona when confronted with difficult political and/or religious issues? Okay yeah definitely, this book here.

--do you enjoy Franzian-type family dramas and narratives that stretch across multiple generations to impress upon the reader a grand feeling of complete character omniscience having learned about all of his/her familial/genetic predispositions? Go! Go! Go!

--have you ever thought to yourself "I wonder what it would be like if a scientist, a psychotic animal rights activist, a fundamentalist Muslim, and a genetically modified mouse were in thr same room together"? Let your oddly specific fantasies come true now!

--is your goodreads' username s.penkevich? I wanna see your review of this so bad, like woah.

--and finally, and most importantly: do you enjoy reading a novel that is tinged with just the right amount of autobiographical flourish so as to give the "she-had-to-have-been-there" type of authenticity to every plot point, and each character is written with such empathy and compassion (no matter their socio-economic background) that every one of them seems to have a stake in the story and the overall outcome in the end? You're looking at the key to your deepest literature needs!

If you answered yes to any or all of these questions then I can certainly recommend this wonderful, impressive debut.

I am a sucker for multi-generational sagas, even more so when said sagas address cultural clashes and brightly illustrate how the world changes around people who are often out of breath trying to keep up with it.

Smith’s famous “On Beauty” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) has a special place in my heart, and I am kicking myself that it took me a long time to get to her acclaimed debut because all the stuff I loved in her other work is here, but as a delicate sapling that has yet to explore into glorious blooms. Her fluid prose, the way she builds her characters – ordinary people who have extraordinary inner lives – the wry and sometimes deliciously dark humor that swirls through the story.

There is no plot per se in “White Teeth”: just the story of how Archie did not kill himself, the story of how Samad had a middle-age crisis, how Irie tries to figure herself out, and how Millat and Magid grew up to be so different from each other, despite being twins.

War threw Archie and Samad together, and a friendship developed over the kind of experiences that no one else can truly grasp. When the two men returned to England, they each married women that they care for but do not understand, and had children that seem to them like they came from an entirely different planet. Smith explores their lives, how they are all tangled in each other’s existence. Their lives are intricately bound together, the net of human connection strongly illustrated by who comes and goes in their lives, and Smith does a wonderful job showing the different perceptions first generation immigrants will have on their cultural identity vs the way their second generation children will see it.

Reading this book hot on the heels of Evaristo’s “Girl, Woman, Other” (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), it’s hard not to find many things in common between both works. I think I found Evaristo's book more readable, I was always more eager to pick it up, but considering this is Smith's debut novel, it is a very impressive work, with a finely drawn cast of characters that feel real in a bittersweet way.

3 and a half stars.