White Teeth: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Wow...I'm Impressed!
Review: "White Teeth" chronicles the adult lives of two men from their days as young soldiers in World War II, through their adventures in North London as they pair up with young wives, and eventually to their frustrations as the confused parents of rebellious teenagers. Archie Jones is a pale, dim-witted Brit with a talent for being consistently mediocre; Samad Iqbal is a temperamental Muslim Bengali trying to hold onto his heritage in modern London, and only sometimes succeeding. Their unlikely friendship wanes after the war, but they eventually find themselves living in the same neighborhood and frequenting the same pub. Although Samad and Archie are the central characters that Smith's witty narrative revolves around, the diverse members of their extended families are significant satellites that propel the narrative forward. Archie marries a beautiful, much younger Jamaican woman named Clara and fathers a robust daughter named Irie; Samad steps into an arranged marriage with the feisty Alsana, and their union is blessed with twin sons, Millat and Magid, born the same year as Irie.

One of the central themes of White Teeth is the way in which parents wish to pass their cultural heritage on to their children, and the way that children simultaneously hold on to their family history and wish to push it away with all their might. The complexities that arise through generational conflicts and the confusions that often are the result of mixing of cultures and values are constantly in the forefront.

What each of the elder generations fails to see, but which Smith keeps reminding the reader, is that they themselves rebelled similarly, and that they are only where they are currently because they stepped away from their own parents' values. In many instances, the older generation is hypocritically trying to force their children to conform to a cultural ideal that they cannot adhere to themselves.

Even though the novel focuses on the longtime friendship between Archie and Samad, it is Irie, Archie's daughter, who remains the calm in the eye of the storm, and brings all of the swirling plots and sub-plots together. Although much has been made about Smith's unusual subject matter for a first novel, and comments have been made about her bravery in venturing out far from the topics of weight, career and love that are so common in the work of first time female novelists, it is the young female character of Irie who is crucial to so many elements of the story. Everything weaves around Irie, even though Archie and Samad are truly the main characters.

Although Zadie Smith establishes herself as a talented storyteller with this novel, the talent that repeatedly amazed me was her exquisite skill with the English language. I found myself fascinated by her linguistic gymnastics and the way in which she combined eloquent imagery with conversational slang and obscenities and still made everything sound perfectly natural. Smith has fun with the language; she sprints and climbs and throws out caution and reserve. And it works beautifully. Try it for yourself! Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Zadie Smith, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.


Rating:
Summary: Movie To Book
Review: After seeing the PBS movie for "White Teeth" I absolutely had to find the author of the book and buy it. How such a story could come about with irony and humor galore was enough to spark my interests and find this book to have and read.

Rating:
Summary: White Teeth are sharp and beautiful!
Review: Archie Jones and the rest of the crazy cast of this madcap novel are REAL, which is to say so idiosyncratic, so weird, so messed up, that it sometimes seems impossible that they were imagined by any writer, much less a writer still young enough to be in college. True, that college happened to be Oxford, and that writer happened to be (become?) Zadie Smith, brilliant, wunderkind, lovely. The sheer scope of this novel, its breadth, its ambition, takes us from the undignified battlefront of WWII reminiscent of Catch-22, to a revolution in Bangladesh, to the grimy, rough and tough streets of working class London in the Seventies like something in the backgound of a music video for The Clash, to the present... and beyond, to that rare place: literary transcendence. Smith accomplishes all that with a disarming confidence and grace; she seems all-knowing and all-powerful where her characters are blind and clumsy; it is this potent mix, the beauty drawn out of the ugly, the brutality of life distilled into haunting, melodic, and ultimately warming prose, that will leave Smith's reader intoxicated by her genius.

White Teeth is not perfect, and the ending is lacking the confidence of the other parts, but it is so brilliant most of the way that when you come to an imperfection your eyes are blinded enough so as not to notice. It is, in the end, a perfect reading experience, one I'd gladly dive into again.

Rating:
Summary: 5 stars for the beginning, 3 stars for the rest
Review: The beginning of Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth is marked by an extraordinary voice: confident, affectionate, satiric, witty. Archibald Jones attempts to kill himself in a car outside a Muslim butchery while pigeons fleeing from the murderous butcher leave streaks of purple excrement across his windshield. Archie's life is spared by the irate butcher because ". . .dying's no easy trick. And suicide can't be put on a list of Things to Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick." This irreverent, comic beginning launches the novel into Archie's life and into that of his best friend Samad Iqbal. Archie, given a new chance at life, marries the much younger Clara, the daughter of a Jamaican Jehovah Witness mother and a passive, emotionally absent father, while Samad, who is always striving to be a good Muslim, enters into an arranged marriage with Alsana, a woman who was not even born while he fought alongside Archie during World War II. Their children - Irie Jones and the twins Millat and Magrid Iqbal - struggle to find their niche in their overwhelming white British surroundings. If Smith had left her novel at that, at exploring the cultural rifts that divide the families and their cultures, this book would have succeeded admirably; however, the author departs from this course to explore a world that contains a snobbishly intellectual English family, genetic engineering, radical Islam, and the end of the world as predicted by the Jehovah Witnesses. While these separate plots often serve as metaphors for the struggle to assimilate, they simply don't do enough to engage the reader. The result is a tedious, wholly unfunny second half. Characterizations that were done so well in the beginning become lost in the noise of the rest, making it difficult to care about what happens to Smith's inventions. Plot turns begin to feel forced, and reactions, unnatural. Most disappointingly, the witty voice of the narrator fades into the background, and is never as strong as it is in the first hundred pages.

The novel owes much to the literary tradition of Victorians such as Dickens and Thackeray, who wrote sweeping novels with comic and/or biting wit. Smith's range is impressive for a first-time novelist, but her skills and literary instincts are not yet honed enough to carry off the sprawl of such a complex concept. Despite this, her descriptions and characterizations are first-rate, even if they get lost among the rest, and her turns of prose can be astonishing.

This is one of those rare instances when I find it difficult to rate a book using the five star system. White Teeth is an ambitious, unconventional novel that ultimately tries to be too much. Readers who want to keep up on literary trends and celebrities will want to read this, since there is much to admire in Smith's work.

Rating:
Summary: Boring...
Review: But it didn't start out that way. A little less than a third of the book is what I was easily able to get through. The writing was very good, it flowed, it was very witty and enjoyable. But once the plot went into one large flashback of the lives of two of the main characters' time in the war I just lost interest. It became pretty boring, almost like someone else had taken over the story and was writing it. I really didn't care about those two characters anymore, I think that flashback really bogged down the story, though it might have been essential to the later plotline, I really don't know now :) But I was bored with it and stopped forcing myself to read. Not my thing I guess.

Rating:
Summary: Three Cheers for Zadie Smith!
Review: There are few writers who have Smith's intelligence and original voice that she displays in this standout first novel. She captures cultural London perfectly. The characters are all vivid and flamboyant and the plot is amazing. I doubt that many other young authors could do better.

Rating:
Summary: An original voice, an entertaining book
Review: Having just finished the book, I can't see what all the fuss was about. If Amazon allowed it, I'd give the book 31/2 stars. However, the huge advance, the Booker Prize, and the avalanche of critical praise were hyperbole. Other reviewers have detailed the plot, so no need to sum up here. The strengths of the book are vivid, colorful characters, an involving plot, a real sense of place, and original writing and language. Though there are no real weaknesses of the book, there's no heft to it either. To me, it read like a grade A comic soap opera and nothing more.

Rating:
Summary: No classic
Review: No classic, but enjoyable anyway, Smith's novel lacks the teeth of a contemporary novel like Franzen's The Corrections.