Rating: 
Summary: EPIC!
Review: ZADIE SMITH'S NEW NOVEL IS A MARRIAGE OF NEW SCHOOL SOCIOLOGY, AND OLD SCHOOL PHILOSOPHY. VERY ELOQUENTLY WRITTEN. SOCRATES, MEETS NOBOKOV, MEETS SISTAH SOULJAH. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Rating: 
Summary: a wicked rass book by a sexy likkle bloodclaat writer
Review: Ms. Smith is a very good writer--ballsy, clever, fascinated with the meaning of words. The real achievement of the book though is that she has written a book that takes London's multicultural personality as a premise instead of subject, with the result that novel reaches beyond the boundaries established for writers of color. Chatty though the novel may be, it still has a lot to say, and it does so with grace and a hipster kind of eloquence. There are details of Jamaica life and culture that miss the mark. But that is to be forgiven. Zaidie Smith can write nuh rass
Rating:
Summary: A very engaging new voice
Review: Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal are unlikely WWII buddies who become post-war neighbors in a north London suburb. Samad sends home to Bengal for a wife, and Archie marries the glorious Jamaican Clara. While Samad wants to be the most traditional of Muslims, he is, as a matrimonial cheater and dedicated self-abuser, almost completely off the religious track. Archie, on the other hand, takes it as it comes. Their refuge is a greasy spoon called O'Connor's (run by Abdul-Mickey, father of Abdul-Jimmy and brother of Abdul-Colin, no one Irish within miles) where they hatch their plots and commiserate when things don't happen the way they'd planned. It is their children who land in the thick of changing England, and this is where "White Teeth" begins to lose its bite. The three friends barreling through the increasingly unsavory London is not as fresh and lively as the earlier chapters and seem less mature in outlook. I was more curious to know more about Clara and Alsi the Bengali bride - both wonderful creations - than about the three kids and KEVIN, the oddball pseudo Muslim terrorist/peace group they tangle with. Zadie Smith is a terrific new voice, and with this book her career has gotten off to a great start. May she keep her quirky, engaging style, her bold and funny characterizations, and continue to grow a writer of ideas and observer of human nature.
Rating: 
Summary: Soap opera saga
Review: I started the book, but unfortunately gave up about half way through. The plot progresses so slowly, and rambles and ambles and backtracks and diverges from the path, again and again, and again. In the end, I didn't have patience to find out what happened in the end. There is humor, but not enough to sustain the ramblings! The book is like a long-winded soap opera that should have been cut back to one episode.
Rating:
Summary: a terrific read!
Review: White Teeth is a wonderful, well written, complex, and verywitty novel about a Bengali Muslim and a working class Brit who hadbeen war buddies, and their families. Circumstances have broughtthese friends to their London suburb where they and their wives (Samad's marriage has been arranged; Archie has married a young Jamaican woman) struggle with cultural, racial, and adolescent issues. A third family brings liberal influences to the multicultural mix. Zadie Smith's characters are sympathetic and entrenched, and the dialects are a pleasure to read. The book isn't perfect--but so worthwhile!
Rating:
Summary: Monstropolous Ingenuity!
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: This year's novel
Review: Salman Rushdie claims on the jacket of the british edition of White teeth that this novel "has bite". Indeed it has, and it ought to worry him. For even if Zadie Smith's book is made on a recipe similar to Rushdie's multicultural stew, her version of today's po-mo society is definitely more tasty than what "the sha of blah" offered with his overdone "The Ground at Her Feeth". The plot is too elusive to relate here, but that doesn't matter since it is the genuinly funny and streetsmart voice of Zadie Smith that captures the reader. The Bookerjudges can call off the search for a winner, White teeth is this year's novel, no doubt about it. Trivia: Note the many allusions to movies such as My Beautiful Laundrette, Goodfellas and The Godfather.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, darkly funny novel!
Review: There have only been a few times when I come across a book that I have to tell everyone I know about, one that immediately pops into my head when someone asks "Have you read anything good lately?" White Teeth is such a novel. What an enjoyable, hilarious and exuberantly written work this is. Zadie Smith is a very talented writer and I look forward to reading her other stuff. The book opens with Archie Jones's failed attempt at suicide in London in 1975. This sounds serious, but Smith handles it with such wit and aplomb that the scene is hilarious. We follow Archie, his friend, Samad Iqbal as they marry, have children and watch their children grow up in a London they just don't understand. The characters are hilarious. Archie is completely clueless, but that doesn't bother him. Samad is a frustrated intellectual stuck being a waiter, trying desperately to validate an act of bravery of one of his ancestors. Their children come of age in the cultural and ethnic melting pot that is modern London. Smith's characters are all wonderfully unique and terrifically funny. This is dark humor at its best! I highly, highly recommend this novel. It lives up to, and surpasses, any of the hype you may have heard. Zadie Smith is a brilliant author. I cannot believe I waited this long to give this novel a whirl. As said earlier, this is novel is unforgettable.
Rating: 
Summary: Does Zadie Smith Own an Eraser?
Review: If you're familiar with the film "Wonderboys," you may remember the giant opus and monument to post-modern self indulgence that once successful novelist Grady Tripp had been working on for years. It was a book that took on an unfocused life of it's own, growing like untended weeds to the extent of including complete genealogical charts of a families horses and fattening itself to an unmanageable weight before finally blowing away in a harbor wind. "White Teeth" could very well have been that novel.
First time novelist Zadie Smith is nothing if not ambitious, as "White Teeth" is the type of book where you will come to dread the simple act of a man walking into a grocery store to buy some chips. In the following pages it's quite possible you will be bludgeoned with the history of the currency the customer produces, the unseemly hygenic habits of the cashier, or the love life of the architect who designed the building. If a child so much as glances at a cathedral you can be sure that a complete hagiography will soon follow. Ultimately this type of exhaustive information succeeds only in quelling the natural momentum the story might have gathered under the knife of a more scrupulous self-editor. As it is, "White Teeth" stands as one of the least intimate books I've read, at times being more of a pyrotechnic display of Smith's obsession with her own cleverness than an actual story of believable flesh and blood characters. I'm assuming that with the advance she apparently recieved, editors were too cowed to actually change anything, and the book's the worse for it.
Although "White Teeth" is ultimately frustrating, and in my opinion quite overrated, at times Smith does write beautiful prose (the dialogue is another matter) and it makes you wonder how good this book could have been had she written it when she was a little older, didn't have quite so much time on her hands, and tired of constantly reaching for strange "teeth" analogies.
Rating:
Summary: A Riveting read
Review: White Teeth fully qualifies as a refreshing as novel. . The characters are lively, identifiable and rich. I also found the dialogue to be rich, one of the reasons that kept the book interesting throughout the read. I was entranced as to what is coming next and kept on reading and reading until the last page.
I also recommend Disciples of Fortune, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, The Line of Beauty,
|
