Book: White Teeth

Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher:



The name Zadie Smith may not be familiar, but chances are it soon will. Three years ago, while still a 21-year-old undergraduate at Cambridge University, Smith began working on a novel. 80 pages got her a six-figure advance and set the literary world a-buzz. Two-and-a-half years on, the novel is finished. The hype, the wait and the advance sum are all justified. Considering the novel’s title, the old cliché is well worth modifying- the bite is as good, even better, than the bark. White Teeth is an ambitious, well-crafted and very funny debut.

Set smack dab in the middle of the ethnic melting pot that is Willesden, northwest London, White Teeth chronicles the events in the lives of a number of families over a period of some thirty years. Things begin with Archie Jones, a white professional leaflet folder, about to gas himself in his car. Stopped by Mo the Bangladeshi butcher (‘We`re not licensed for suicides around here. This place halal. Kosher, understand?’) Archie gets a new lease on life. He marries Clara, a buxom Jamaican woman almost 30 years his junior trying to escape the clutches of her Jehovah’s Witness family, and the couple have a daughter, Irie.

Enter Samad Iqbal, a Bengali immigrant and former WWII colleague of Archie. Samad, a waiter, is married to Alsana, who works in a factory that manufactures leather items for a gay-themed store in Soho called Domination. Samad and Alsana have twin boys, Magid and Millat. Like George, the patriarch in the film East is East (recently reviewed on Chowk by Bina Shah), Samad tries to inculcate in his sons the values he thinks they should have. Alarmed by Magid’s growing Anglicisation (he takes to calling himself Mark), Samad packs him off ‘home’ to Chittagong so he can be cleansed of his pernicious English influences. Millat goes the other way. He renounces white girls and joins a militant organization, the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, which Irie points out have a bit of problem with their name, the acronym for it being KEVIN.

To try and explain White Teeth’s particular genius, however, by detailing its many plots, would be pointless. This is a deeply layered book that presents us with a troupe of colourful, incisively drawn characters and engages many issues- race, nationality, identity, history, gender, religion, all with great courage and wit. Smith’s response to England’s post-colonial society and the struggle to come to terms with its many contradictions and paradoxes is to go beyond the conventional theories. What she seems to come up with is an idea of a ‘post-post-colonial’ society; indeed, a post-racial society.

The varying fortunes of Smith`s characters reflect this. Samad, sitting with Archie in O’Connell’s café on the Finchley high road, hearkens back to a romantic past. He regales anyone willing to listen with the story of his great-grandfather Mangal Pande, who Samad insists fired the first shot in the 1857 Indian Mutiny. At the same time he is bewildered by the present, by his wife wearing sari and sneakers, by the way his sons have turned out: ‘The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green bow-tie wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother.’ But it is not all comic, as Samad also voices the immigrant’s fear of losing his identity through the choices of his children. ‘They have both lost their way,’ he grumbles. ‘Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave.’

Alsana too becomes as confused and disillusioned as her husband, by a society that has changed so much from the one she thought existed when she first arrived. In 1987, when a tropical hurricane visits England, her world is turned upside down. Jolly Old England- epitomised by the fusty BBC weatherman Michael Fish- has betrayed her.

‘England this is meant to be! I moved to England so I wouldn’t have to do this. Never again will I trust Mr Crab.’

‘Amma, it`s Mr Fish.’

‘From now on, he`s Mr Crab to me,’ snapped Alsana with a dark look. ‘BBC or no BBC.’

But if Smith ridicules the colonial generation immigrant’s futile attempts to maintain the status quo, she also steadfastly refuses to indulge in ‘Can’t we all just get along’ type tokenism. Here the Chalfens, a white pseudo-Marxist family come into play. All platitude and patronage, the Chalfens typify the well-intentioned but ultimately clueless liberal attitude to a multi-cultural society. Witness FutureMouse, an atrocious experiment of Marcus Chalfen: born with brown fur, FutureMouse has been genetically engineered to turn albino white. In a touching piece of symbolism that ends the novel, it breaks out of its cage and runs away.

If White Teeth has a flaw it is in Smith’s attempt to tie up too many ends neatly, an impossible task given the scope and depth of this epic work. She contrives a false climax, trying to spell out themes that have already been adequately noted. Smith also doesn’t take her tantalising theory of post-racialism far enough. But these are minor quibbles in what is a powerful serio-comic novel. ‘Dickensian’ is a description that many reviewers have found apt, what with Smith’s seemingly effortless ability to parody and ridicule her characters. Smith also echoes more contemporary writers- Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, and the Trinidadian born Samuel Selvon come to mind- especially where her raucous, pitch-perfect dialogue is concerned. Still her voice is her own, self-assured and very witty.

White Teeth is an impressive debut from a person so young, and the novel’s ultimately celebratory nature reflects a youthful optimism. And no one reflects this optimism better than Irie, the character that comes closest to the author herself (Smith is of mixed English and Jamaican parentage). With a name that means ‘no problem’ in Caribbean slang, Irie wishes she could be like people who don’t care ‘who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be,’ people who can ‘open a door and all they’ve got behind it is a bathroom or a lounge and not this endless maze and everybody’s old historical shit all over the place.’ A sentiment that`s hard to argue with.