Thursday, August 08, 2019

WHITE TEETH


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White Teeth, Zadie Smith, Random House Inc, 2000, 448 pp
 
I first read this debut novel by Zadie Smith in 2012. I reread it this time for a reading group. Here is what I thought about it after the first read:
If literary fiction could always, or at least more often, be as good as this...well, I guess I would be an even more voracious reader than I am. I decided to read White Teeth before I jumped into NW because I read somewhere that both books are set in the same neighborhood of Northwest London. I have not felt as satisfied as I did while reading White Teeth in quite a while--well except for two weeks earlier when I read Telegraph Avenue.
In fact the two books have some parallels. Both throw together families of varying backgrounds who are joined together by a friendship between two men. Both are grounded in a neighborhood and poke around into what makes people the way they are.
I have only been to London once when I was a teen, but I could see, even smell, the setting of this book. I think watching movies helps, but the descriptions put me there, in the streets, in the apartments, restaurants, bars, and schools.
Working class Archie Jones and Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal have been friends since fighting together in World War II, when one saved the other's life. Samad lost the use of one hand and Archie has a piece of metal forever in his thigh. Archie's second wife Clara is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant who is a devout Jehovah's Witness. Samad's wife came to him via an arranged marriage in the Deshi community. Each man in his own way is bewildered by his offspring as well as by his wife, not to mention the pace of life in the last decade of the century and the millennium. 
Smith uses multiple viewpoints and various bits of history which she calls "root canals" to build the intertwining strands of three families. The children of Archie and Samad get tangled up with a middle class English family, the Chalfens: progressive, liberal, educated idiots with their beliefs in science, psychology and enlightened parenting. 
They all have white teeth. The each want love, a better life, a belief in something beyond themselves. That sounds serious but they ricochet off each other in the most comic ways. White Teeth is a comedy show and a reality show resting on a keen awareness and observance of the multicultural lives we now lead.
Though Zadie Smith takes her time developing the stories of these characters, she begins right off with a sense of tension, maintaining it at a disturbing steadily intensifying rate until the final explosion. Really, I had no idea where she was taking me but went willingly only to have it brought home to me that these root canals are reproduced in every generation.
"But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story."
 
As you can see, I was impressed on that first reading. It turns out I remembered it well but rereading was worth the time spent. 
 
1) I got just as much enjoyment but I understood the ending much better. I was able to see how she accomplished a perfect knitting together and tying up of the multiple threads the story contains.
 
2) For the other reading group members who struggled with it, some not even finishing it, all of whom pretty thoroughly disliked it, I could sympathize. It is not a novel for everyone though it has all of humanity in it: colonizers, colonized, immigrants, mixed cultures and religions, the privileged, the underprivileged, the old and the young.
 
Perhaps Zadie Smith, like many novelists, tried to put everything in her head into her debut. Still, it got the attention of the literary world and she is having a great career.

14 comments:

  1. Terrific commentary on this book. I tend to like novels with a lot going on in them. On the other hand, in the wrong hands such books can turn into a mess. Even when well executed, I can see how such density would not work for every reader.

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    1. Thank you very much, Brian. We like some of the same things in novels, I suspect.

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  2. I have loved, loved, loved everything of Zadie Smith's that I've read, but I have not yet read this one. However, it's on my list and I hope to get to it this year.

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  3. I've thought about picking this (and her other books) up from time to time but never did so. Maybe I need to rethink that...

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    1. Oh yes! Especially because you are British.

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  4. Great review! This sounds like a novel you must unpack slowly to really grasp everything that is happening. One that will really make you think about life. We need more of those novels.

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    1. Those are the kind of novels I love the most!

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  5. It is a different wild kind of read -- she does seem to put the kitchen sink into it -- and you have no idea where it's going but it takes you along willingly.

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    1. Good, Susan! That would work as a blurb.

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  6. i guess i don't take live authors seriously enough; i tend to dismiss them as a whole, probably unfairly... bad mudpuddle!

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    1. I had to think for a moment. Live authors? Then I got it. You like to read dead ones. Nothing wrong with that!

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  7. What a great review, I felt almost like I re-read it myself. Maybe I will.

    I read White Teeth with a book club shortly after it was published. I really liked it and also read one of her next novels, On Beauty, also a very good book.

    Unfortunately, I didn't blog them right away since I had no blog, yet, so my reviews are not very large.

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    1. Thanks, Marianne. I need to reread On Beauty since I did not get it the first time.

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