Rating: 
Summary: Genuinely overrated
Review: This is a fine first novel and shows signs of real promise-- it's witty, thoughtful and there's lots of energy on display. But it ain't the cherries jubilee the reviewers have made it out to be. Too long, too pleased with its own verbal-strutting, the novel is more like a show and tell of dialects and set pieces than a cohesive hole. And it does tend to go on and on and on when Smith finds a character or a subject she's hooked on. One day she'll write a terrific book. This isn't it.
Rating: 
Summary: Different point of view
Review: zadie really highlights the difference between race relations in Great Britain and the U.S. She does an excellent job of "dentistry" while exploring racial identity in context among the non-whites in her story.
Rating:
Summary: This is a great book.
Review: This is the kind of book that is so funny, so rich, so dead on, that you want to ring up your best friend at 1:00 am and say, "Listen to this." Zadie Smith is a gem.
Rating: 
Summary: What goes around comes around....
Review: I can't remember when I read a book that made me laugh so hard I cried. And--not in just one place but over and over from the beginning to the last page. If this book doesn't win the Booker and every other award in England...well let's give it a Pulitzer in the U.S. And Oprah..I sure hope you can endorse books written by citizens of the U.K. It's too easy to call this book zany. And, having read Simone de Beauvoir's writing, I can understand how a 24-year old can be brilliant. "White Teeth" is a masterpiece: complex, confounding, existential, and hilarious. Smith takes a wry look at social relationships, including friendships, marriages, parent-child connections, young lovers, gangs, cultural groups, religious cults, intellectual circles, and guys who hang aroung greasy pubs. She meticulously attends to what she observes and deftly records all the nuances of character and behaviour. She is the Jane Austin of the Age of Aquarius. She is the Coraghassan Boyle of Britain. Smith accurately reflects and humorously depicts the times we live in--a world where individuals are struggling to define the meaning of existence via psychiatry, religion, science, and personal relationships. A world where cultural imperatives are not nearly as critical as "who made me" and "why do I exist." This is a story of generations and generatonal warfare. Of children who don't understand parents, of parents who don't understand children or each other. Of children who think someone else's parents are superior. Of grandparents who are Jehovah's witnesses and ride motorbikes with former boyfriends who have "seen the light" and great-grandparents who start mutinies but fail to pull the trigger. Every thread of the narrative is woven into a seamless tale--there are NO loose ends. "What goes around comes around" until the end of time. What is set in motion affects the life that set it in motion. Is this fate? Is it the result of rational thought and action? Is it the will of Allah, God, Jehovah? How is the Nazi Herr Ferret, with the bleeding tear ducts, Archie Jones and Samid Iqbal encounter in WWII Romania tied to the creation of the SuperMouse by Marcus Chalfen (alias Chalpinski a Jewish emigree from Poland via Germany). How do the genes of Englishman Captain Charlie Durham ("damn fool bwoy") who sacrificed a thousand Jamaican people for a woman he never knew come to reside in Hortense, Clara and Irie of Jamaican descent. How does Clara loose her teeth, loose Ryan, and manage to fall for another Englishman of dubious intelligence? How does the identical DNA in Magid and Millat Iqbal coincide with such different personalities. Samid sends Magid to Bangladesh to be raised in the Muslim culture--but he becomes more English than the English and, in spite of his father's protests, returns to England become patent lawyer involved in Marcus Chalfin's SuperMouse project. Millat, the twin who Samid cannot afford to send to Bangladesh grows up in North London, smokes and sells Marijuana, has a zillion girfriends and loves gangster movies. His heroes are de Niro, Liotta, Pacino. He attempts to renounce these devilish pursuits when he encounters the green-bowtie wearing militant Muslin gang known as KEVIN (yes,they know they have an acronym problem). KEVIN seeks the destruction of all ungodly behavior, including Marcus Chalfin's ungodly experiments with mice. Millat's affinity with gangsters seems convenient ("As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster" becomes "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim.") Marcus's son Joshua grows a Jewfro and joins FATE, an animal rights group living in a Victorian mansion trashed by Australian illegal immigrants. FATE is the violent arm of Greenpeace that targets the inhumane treatment of animals--including mice raised for nefarious purposes. Suddenly, it's New Year's Eve and all the characters are headed for Trafalgar Square. FATE travels in it's liberation bus borrowed from a social worker. KEVIN and Sam and Archie and their wives, and Meena the lesbian "niece of shame" travel via subway. Hortense and Ryan follow the Jehovah's Witness bus on their motorscooter. Is it the END OF THE WORLD?
Rating:
Summary: Zadie Smith is the real deal
Review: I cannot remember when I last read a book at lightning speed, such is the effect of "White Teeth." When I am sending e-mails to friends, raving about particular insights and passages from a novel, it's nothing short of true love. Zadie Smith's intellect, range (as far as her ability to appeal to the high-brow and low-brow with her diction and prose and her ability to weave the poignant tales that represent so many different races and cultures. . .) is mind-boggling as in "I -can't-believe-she's-(Smith)-only-24-years-old." Somehow, I think this excitement is only matched by the time when I first introduced to the work of E. Danticat. Like Danticat, Smith has only given us a slight taste of what she can do. She is a novelist that we're bound to hear so much more about throughout her lifetime as her first novel accomplishes what more experienced writers have failed to do: offer a compelling, "good read" that will make you laugh out loud, cry and say, "Wow. What a brilliant insight. . ." Read it and spread the word. I know I have (& I just got the book in the mail yesterday! I only speed-read books that I simply can't wait to finish!).
Rating:
Summary: Great novel-Big Up
Review: I read a good review of White Teeth in Talk magazine and I immediately went out and got it, then I read about Smith in Vibe and People. All were glowing reviews and they were right. This novel delves into multiculturalism in a realistic way with characters and issues that are, at one time or another at the forefront of every immigrant's mind. It was also interesting to read because of Smith's age. I absolutely enjoyed something rich, complex, textured and positive from my generation. I am an avid reader who always has an eye out of Caribbean greats and when I saw Channer's comments (having enjoyed his novel and waiting anxiously for the next)I felt compelled to celebrate Zadie Smith also and say job well done, I can hardly wait for the next, hope its not longer than three years in coming :) White Teeth is a great read, funny, serious, sad, and with great and memorable characters.
Rating:
Summary: Somewhat envious of her talent!
Review: How did she do it? She's only 25, and was several years younger when she started writing it. So much is packed into it and it is driven forward by energetic, humourous, optimistic writing. It is tempting to say that Zadie Smith has managed to pick up the part of London she lives in and drop it neatly into a book, along with history, science, religion, and the colonial roots of the wonderful array of characters. I'm sure if I'd been sitting having a chat with Zadie a few years ago and she had told me what she intended to write I would have nodded interestedly and said 'mmmm....brilliant idea...ermmm... bit too ambitious though maybe, don't you think....what about just concentratiing on this idea.. or this idea.. or...'. On the other hand, I don't know her from Adam, and if she demonstrated the passion of ambition that is evident in the book, then I would probably just nod and say, 'well.... you just go ahead.. we'll just keep to our little ideas... and take life one theme at a time... but you just go ahead and whack it all in there!' Obviously it is not perfect. To be really picky, at times she overwrites, she gets carried away by the flow of the narrative and slips in words and phrases that could have been smoothed off. She grapples with big themes and shows a deep understanding of them, but at times throws in distracting humour which holds us back from a greater engagement with these issues. Not that I want to criticize her use of humour. It is wonderful to read a serious novel which also entertains. There is so much humour in life alongside the tragedies, the racism and the poverty, and it is brilliantly captured here. There is a wonderful balance between positive and negative in the novel. It is the author's energy which holds this all together. How can she have such a strong, seemingly-positive outlook at the age of 25 when she has also faced and grappled with the darker issues of our times? Very rarely do I read a book twice, and certainly not within the space of six months, but I am now reading 'White Teeth' for the second time and enjoying it even more than the first time around. Maybe I will have to keep reading it until her next novel is published! For potential readers in the from outside the London-area who may be concerned that it might be rather parochial, about a small part of London, full of that odd English humour and so on, I have to say 'FEAR NOT'. Although the characters of the novel are all products of London's own brand of multiculturalism, their ways of thinking, their emotions, and the problems which they encounter have a universalism which is likely to make White Teeth a success in all parts of the globe. It is wonderful in a way to hear that the author was not satisfied with this novel. She thinks it has many weaknesses. By heck, we better watch out if she writes a novel she is remotely satisfied with!
Rating:
Summary: Dazzling, never false
Review: White Teeth is a tour de force. How does a 24-year-old know so much about the really big questions? Totally absorbing, with characters you gotta love-- not a victim in the bunch. Best book I have read in years.
Rating:
Summary: A Modern Comic Masterpiece
Review: Zadie Smith's remarkable first novel, White Teeth, deserves all the praise and attention it's gotten since its publication earlier this year. This big, rich multicultural cacophony of a novel is a modern comic masterpiece that brilliantly captures the mixture and conflict of races, ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs in London at the millenium. Moreover, unlike other British writers who sometimes seem condescending and unabashedly full of themselves (Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie immediately come to mind), Zadie Smith's writing is full of good humor and prescient insight into the value of even the most disparate life experiences. Smith anchors her story around the unlikely friendship of an easy-going, seemingly unflappable working-class Englishman, Archibald Jones, and a deep-thinking, serious Bengali Muslim waiter, Samad Iqbal. The two first meet inside a tank in the waning days of World War II. They then reunite thirty years later in North London, two unsuccessful middle aged men living out their lives in O'Connell's Poolroom, "an Irish poolroom run by Arabs with no pool tables." But while the stories of Archie and Samad anchor the narrative, their relationship is only a small part of this hilarious and deeply insightful novel. Zadie Smith, in reviewing her own novel in the British publication Butterfly, described White Teeth as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing ten-year-old." The amazing thing is that her description is accurate, for we get not merely the story of the unlikely pair of Archie and Samad, but also many other amusing and intersecting stories, all of them driven by the clash of culture, belief, race, traditon, lineage, and science which forms the turmoil which marks London, and all of the Western world's major cities, at the millenium. We get the story of Archie's young Jamaican wife, Clara, and of Clara's mother, Hortense, a devout and rapturous Jehovah's Witness. We get the story of Samad's turbulent relationship with his wife, Alsana, as well as Samad's struggle to raise his two twin sons, Millat and Magid, in the face of a materialist culture that pervades and undermines traditionalism of all kinds. We get the story of Marcus and Joyce Chalfen, one a geneticist and the other a pop horticulturist, and their son, Josh. The Chalfens are unstintingly secular, scientific and self-centered celebrants of their own ideology of "Chalfenism". Finally, we get the story of Irie, the awkward daughter of Archie and Clara, who winds through the novel, its characters and situations, searching for an identity in the tangled history of her Jamaican past and the crowded cultural stew of her North London present. In Smith's words, capturing the essence of her novel in a couple of sentences: "It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course." Believe everything you've read and heard about this novel because it's true: this is the best first novel to be published in a long time!
Rating:
Summary: Almost Everything it's Supposed to Be
Review: I think it's always a pleasure to find a novel that's going to stretch expectations a little bit. Ms Smith's novel is almost all it's supposed to be. It is a very entertaining read, and while it allows for some meditation on the reader's part, Smith fairly constantly keeps the characters grounded. As the story moves from Archie and Samad to the twins and Irie, I thought she sacrificed the story of Archie and Samad, allowing them to become caricatures more than full characters, but she developes Irie in compensation. There's a lot of Rushdie here, and the ending comes like a wall, but overall, the novel's certainly worth a read.
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