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White Teeth: A Novel, by Zadie Smith
Download PDF White Teeth: A Novel, by Zadie Smith
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Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
- Sales Rank: #9014 in Books
- Color: Other
- Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 2001-06-12
- Released on: 2001-06-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.10" w x 5.20" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 464 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is a formidably ambitious debut. First novelist Zadie Smith takes on race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics, and such is her wit and inventiveness that these weighty subjects seem effortlessly light. She also has an impressive geographical range, guiding the reader from Jamaica to Turkey to Bangladesh and back again.
Still, the book's home base is a scrubby North London borough, where we encounter Smith's unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal, who served together in the so-called Buggered Battalion during World War II. In the ensuing decades, both have gone forth and multiplied: Archie marries beautiful, bucktoothed Clara--who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother--and fathers a daughter. Samad marries stroppy Alsana, who gives birth to twin sons. Here is multiculturalism in its most elemental form: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."
Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided, and entirely familiar. Reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. Even a simple exchange between Alsana and Clara about their pregnancies has a comical ring of truth: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's... parts." And the men, of course, have their own involvement in bodily functions: The deal was this: on January 1, 1980, like a New Year dieter who gives up cheese on the condition that he can have chocolate, Samad gave up masturbation so that he might drink. It was a deal, a business proposition, that he had made with God: Samad being the party of the first part, God being the sleeping partner. And since that day Samad had enjoyed relative spiritual peace and many a frothy Guinness with Archibald Jones; he had even developed the habit of taking his last gulp looking up at the sky like a Christian, thinking: I'm basically a good man. Not all of White Teeth is so amusingly carnal. The mixed blessings of assimilation, for example, are an ongoing torture for Samad as he watches his sons grow up. "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." These classic immigrant fears--of dilution and disappearance--are no laughing matter. But in the end, they're exactly what gives White Teeth its lasting power and undeniable bite. --Eithne Farry
From Publishers Weekly
The scrambled, heterogeneous sprawl of mixed-race and immigrant family life in gritty London nearly overflows the bounds of this stunning, polymathic debut novel by 23-year-old British writer Smith. Traversing a broad swath of cultural territory with a perfect ear for the nuances of identity and social class, Smith harnesses provocative themes of science, technology, history and religion to her narrative. Hapless Archibald Jones fights alongside Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal in the English army during WWII, and the two develop an unlikely bond that intensifies when Samad relocates to Archie's native London. Smith traces the trajectory of their friendship through marriage, parenthood and the shared disappointments of poverty and deflated dreams, widening the scope of her novel to include a cast of vibrant characters: Archie's beautiful Jamaican bride, Clara; Archie and Clara's introspective daughter, Irie; Samad's embittered wife, Alsana; and Alsana and Samad's twin sons, Millat and Magid. Torn between the pressures of his new country and the old religious traditions of his homeland, Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh while keeping Millat in England. But Millat falls into delinquency and then religious extremism, as earnest Magid becomes an Anglophile with an interest in genetic engineering, a science that Samad and Millat repudiate. Smith contrasts Samad's faith in providence with Magid's desire to seize control of the future, involving all of her characters in a debate concerning past and present, determinism and accident. The tooth--half root, half protrusion--makes a perfect trope for the two families at the center of the narrative. A remarkable examination of the immigrant's experience in a postcolonial world, Smith's novel recalls the hyper-contemporary yet history-infused work of Rushdie, sharp-edged, fluorescent and many-faceted. Agent, Georgia Garrett. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Smith (recently profiled in an issue of The New Yorker) has written an epic tale of two interconnected families. It begins with the suicide attempt of hapless, coin-flipping Archibald Jones on New Year's Day, 1975, and ends, after a 100-year ramble back and forth through time, on New Year's Eve, 1992, with his accidental (or preordained?) release of a poor mutant mouse programmed to do away with the randomness of creation. Smith evokes images of teeth throughout the novel. Do they symbolize some characteristic shared by all of humanity in this novel about ethnicity, class, belonging, homeland, family, adolescence, identity, blindness, and ignorance? Or are they meant to distract the reader from the all-encompassing theme of fate? Smith's characters are tossed about by decisions made deliberately, rashly, or by the flip of a coin. As Smith pieces together this story with bits of fabric from different times and places, the reader must contemplate whether our choices determine our future or whether fate leads us to an inevitable destiny. This fine first novel from Smith is most highly recommended for all libraries.
---Rebecca A. Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
241 of 272 people found the following review helpful.
Monstropolous Ingenuity!
By Mr. K. Mahoney
This is a first class debut novel, which has made the news due to the huge advance, which the author received - a six-figure number. So, the question seems to be: is White Teeth worth all that money? The answer has to be YES.
White Teeth is a brilliant novel, superbly confident in its execution. It starts off in 1975, the year of the author's birth, with the attempted suicide of Archibald Jones. Anyone who was born in 1970s Britain cannot fail but identify with the characters and events in this book. If you can recall the VW badge craze, then this is the book for you. However, this is not just a novel for the younger generation, for there is at least one extended family in White Teeth, each member of which is brought vividly to life. There's Archibald Jones and Samed Iqbal, who first meet in a British tank in 1945, and who then meet up again thirty years later to start the families featured within White Teeth. There's the brilliant and comic portrayal of the aged Hortense Bowden, an avid Jehovah's Witness, who keeps waiting for the end of the world.
Zadie Smith's novel has been described as Dickensenian, but I think there's a touch of Thackeray in there too. The author mocks her characters, and parodies them, but she also has a lot of compassion for them. No one, in the world of White Teeth, is beyond redemption. Zadie Smith's characters are truly vibrant. Take Samed Iqbal and his troubles with 'slapping the salami'. As a reader, you begin to wonder how Zadie Smith has such insight into the male mind and universe, because it rings so true.
For anyone embarking on a Cultural Studies course, this novel is a must. Throw away your textbooks with their dry statistics! One of White Teeth's main themes is the mix of cultures in North London, from the Bengali Iqbals, to the archetypal Englishman Archie Jones, to the half-Jamaican Bowdens, and a slight smattering of the Irish. The novel maps these characters as they try to live out their years in a world which is losing religion and tradition. Samed kidnaps one of his sons to be brought up as a proper Bengali back home, while his other son, Millat, flirts with girls and joins the fundamentalist Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN - they've got an acronym problem).
History and fate are intermingled in this novel. Hortense Bowden's apocalyptic vision of the future is indivisibly linked to the aftershocks of her birth. Samed can't stop boring people with tales of his illustrious ancestor, the rebellious Mangal Pande. Irie Jones seeks to visit her family's home of Jamaica. And Joyce Chalfen sees genius in each Chalfen portrait, whilst Joshua Chalfen literally joins up with FATE. Archie Jones, who leaves most decisions to the flick of a coin, also finds that History has a nasty shock in store for him. However, the future's present here also, with Marcus Chalfen's work on genetics forming a pivotal part of the plot.
Like BBC TV's 'Our Friends in the North', White Teeth is divided up amongst a handful of years relevant to the characters. So, you can wallow in nostalgia as you see the Berlin Wall fall down once more, relive of the turmoil of that October 1987 storm, and remind yourself of the Bradford protest against The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie's review of White Teeth is the only bit of marketing on the front cover, and indeed, Zadie Smith has been compared favourably with Rushdie.
There are quite a few pop culture allusions scattered throughout the novel, but I doubt that these will date, as they tend to be of the immortal kind (references to 'Taxi Driver', and 'Goodfellas'). The plot of another gangster movie, 'Miller's Crossing', seems to reflect Archie Jones' dilemma. But please don't point any tedious accusations of theft in Zadie Smith's direction. She has her own, extremely witty, voice as a writer, and White Teeth comes very much from her perspective. It seems that Zadie Smith has been writing this novel for a very long time: witness the similarity of the characters and story in `Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor', a story short she wrote for the Cambridge May Anthologies in 1997.
There are only a few jarring notes. Smith has a tendency to write aesthetic words such as 'monstropolous', when there's really no need to do it, other than maybe showing off. Having said that, you try looking up `monstropolous' in any online dictionary, and you'll have drawn a blank. But if you look up references to the word on the net, then it points all the way to Zora Neale Hurston's `Their Eyes were Watching God'. Hurston's writing was rediscovered and promoted by Alice Walker in the 70s, and this tome is credited by many for being the first novel in which Southern U.S. Blacks are portrayed as being independent from White society. Once you consider the provenance of `monstropolous', there can be no possible objection to Zadie Smith's prose. What had once seemed intrusive, now has a power all its own. If a single word could tell a story, then `monstropolous' is it. My first impression was wrong. There are no discordant notes. The music is sublime.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Hilarious and empathic
By Romano Smith
In the last thirty-five years, I can remember "outright and prolonged laughter" while reading three novels: K. Amis's "Lucky Jim," P. Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," and D. Lodge's "The British Museum is Falling Down." It has been a long time but, finally, here is one more to add to the list. In some ways, what Ms Smith has done is even more impressive when one realizes that her humor is spread among a very wide cast of characters, all of whom we come to know very well, and a variety of times and situations. The narrative has a real drive to it and this, too, intensifies both the humor and the pathos of the characters. It is not as if these characters are particularly novel: the reader will probably feel that he or she knows them or their type. But what Ms. Smith does is to take the familiar and give it a twist or a shove into some unexpected territory. This ability as well as the broad cultural [popular as well as the more traditional and literary] foundation from which the author works make it all the more remarkable that this novel was written when she was only twenty-one. I suppose this is to her credit as well as to the credit of the British educational system. One thing is certain: This is one writer who seems to be able to see more facets of the ethnic and cultural melange than just about anyone else. It may be a cliche, but while I couldn't stop reading, I certainly did not want the book to end. And I await Ms. Smith's second novel with great anticipation.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Abdul-Trevor??!!
By A Customer
I really wanted to like this book, but I just didn't buy into some of the characters. Smith is quite ambitious to write about the thoughts and dreams of middle-aged men and women when she herself is under 30, but sometimes the depictions are convincing.
Little errors bothered me repeatedly. I don't swallow that any Muslim who considers himself or herself even remotely observant would adopt a sacreligious name like "Abdul Trevor" (which would imply that the person by this name is a worshipper of Trevor). Still, at least the Muslims in this novel were presented with some sense of dignity, as opposed to the Jewish characters, who are ruthlessly lampooned (I suppose Smith tries to make up for this in her second novel, about Kabbalist autograph hounds, which I have not read).
On the other hand, the plot does flow and I found "White Teeth" to be light reading and not at all difficult to finish. Not a great book, but neither is it the misery that some of the other readers on this website would portray it as.
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