White Teeth: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Precocious wunderkind sums up the personal in the global
Review: To call Zadie Smith's maiden effort a promising debut is calling the extraordinary mundane. I was blown away by the breath of her knowledge, insight and maturity and how she gives a voice to the multi-culti experiments that shape the streets of cosmopolitan cities these days from London to Delhi. She does an excellent job of blending the various foibles of her protaganists with the tides of the times and I loved how sympathetic she seemed to even her least likable characters. The caricatures are loving yet fierce and the character development is totally believable. I know of no other recent work of fiction that sings so loudly the tune: we are all in this together and all niches of obsession are temporary shelter.

Rating:
Summary: Caustic Wit and Irreverent Humor
Review: I found this novel to be thoroughly entertaining having read it at the urgings of a friend of mine, a professor who selected this as one of a handful of novels he used to teach a cultural collisions course on Muslim culture. The novel revolves around two, dysfunctional families, one a mix of Caucasian and Jamaican, and the other, supplanted Bengalis. The backdrop is Willesden, a London borough. Through the character's perspectives, we become privy to the tribulations of the South Asian ethnic community. A caustically witty book, White Teeth takes on a variety of issues, from religious activism to genetic engineering, and very cleverly brings these issues to the reader's attention through some of the innate absurdities of these same issues. For instance, Smith practically skewers the Jehovah's Witnesses and their penchant for mistakenly "prophesying" the End of the World. Giving equal time to Muslims, Smith also takes on the strictures of Islam. One of the main characters, Samad Iqbal, makes a pact with God forswearing masturbation in exchange for drinking; both Islamic taboos. Samad, who is a "faithful" Muslim, has a difficult time following all the tenets of his religion. Smith's novel reminds me of Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, another humorous take on an ethnic family living dysfunctionally in England. Both are written in an extremely irreverent, yet clever manner, where East and West clash not only on the streets, but also in the homes of these supplanted families. But Smith takes her caustic tone to a higher plane than Kureishi, her wit and insight shines through on virtually every page.

Rating:
Summary: Memorable characters
Review: I personally enjoyed the depth of the characters in this book. There were, initially SO MANY characters, but the main ones are definitely memorable. The author has talent for looking deep into a person and writing about them like a cartoon artist would paint them. The book is full of reality: dreams that, once realized, are never as great as we dreamed them up to be --plans that don't go quite right. The author must be quite a pessimist. The book doesn't have a plot that grabs you and makes you continue turning pages. However, the pace speeds up a little bit. What the book lacks in plot, it makes up for with it's characters.

Rating:
Summary: A delightful romp through a witty, educated mind...
Review: Zadie Smith is clever, amusing, charming, objective and
full of ironic ideas which she transfers, brilliantly, to paper.
I am not going to go into much here, because so many reviewers already did. Except: I did get a bit tired of the
very cleverness that drove the book, and the ending was slightly disappointing to me, as well...but I did laugh at the last line...just as I'd thought of Archie, yes. Still, I gave it five
stars for being an amazingly entertaining first novel. There were times when I compared her to Ann Frank...simply for the sheer genius...

Rating:
Summary: Impressive first novel, but not a GREAT book
Review: I have to say that I really enjoyed this book for the most part. I found it a really comfortable read and quite comical at points. However, it seemed to have a lot of careless editorial mistakes that kept distracting me. At one point, I am pretty sure she gets the twins confused and some of the dialogue didn't fit so well with the time period the story was supposed to be taking place in. Again though, I think these errors have to do with inexperience, (although I imagine the editor had slightly more, what went wrong?)

I also thought the ending was really weak, I loved the way she built up the characters and the action, but it all seemed to kind of flop around at the end.

Worth reading and I look forward to more in the future...

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Comic Debut
Review: Zadie Smith's remarkable first novel, White Teeth, deserves all the praise and attention it's gotten since its publication two years ago. This big, rich multicultural cacophony of a novel is a brilliant comic narrative that 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."

While Smith's narrative energy dissipates somewhat during that latter part of the novel, "White Teeth" is still the best first novel to be published in a long time. Read it, enjoy it and look forward to many more novels from this brilliantly funny young author.

Rating:
Summary: In fact, he hadn't read the book...
Review: She spends the vast majority of the book covering a Bangladeshi family and she does so with great humor, knowledge, sympathy, and love. The Millat sections are usually the best parts. Never over-written, no bag of tricks here, a very straightforward format but quirky in its own way.

Rating:
Summary: One of my (many) favorite books
Review: I've never written an Amazon review before, but was finally moved to do so by reading a preceding review in which the reviewer said:

"I couldn't stand any of the characters; I didn't empathize with them. Perhaps this is because I am a white American, far removed from the London Zadie Smith writes of, but I doubt it. I don't think that she (the writer) likes any of her characters, except for perhaps Irie, the only character that actually develops during the course of the novel. At one point early in the book, I thought to myself that Zadie Smith must be a rather mean person to describe so many people so hatefully."

I wonder whether this reader and I read the same book.

I too am white and American, and that made the book especially important, interesting and educational for me.

I felt it was a valuable privilege to read the obviously honestly told, and deeply felt, experience of a person so different from me as Zadie Smith.

I am also grateful she still has the hope and passion to make the effort to tell it, since many nonwhites have given up trying to talk about the subjects of which Smith writes, at least to a mixed-race audience.

One of the things that most delighted and impressed me about this book was what I experienced as Smith's deep compassion, which I believe she extended to almost all her characters, across color, culture, gender, sexual orientation and religion.

The only characters I recall her having treated without compassion were-- perhaps not coincidentally-- also probably the most egregious hypocrites in the book.

I do see this as a flaw, but certainly not enough of one to significantly diminish my overall good opinion of, and pleasure in reading, the book.

Reading this book has deepened my understanding of people different from me in ways Zadie Smith's characters are different; it made my understanding more visceral, and rooted it more deeply in specifics; and although I don't believe anyone not in her characters' situation can ever truly say they know what it's like to be a first or second-generation, minority non-white immigrant, I think this book has brought me another step closer. I recommend it for this reason as much as for the fun I had, and hope others will have, reading it.

Smith's writing skill made me marvel. She somehow managed to move her language and tone from high culture to pop and hop culture, from poetry to trash talk, and never break the spell.

She told a heart-breaking story of great complexity, and she told it with humor and insight into her characters and our contemporary culture that made me snort out loud with laughter more than once.

The above use of the phrase "our contemporary culture" indicates another thing I admire about Smith's book: although she's writing about London, everything important she has to say about her characters' issues, history, feelings, and cultures is piercingly relevant to what's going on worldwide, including the Americanization of the planet.

This book is, for me, one of the most shining examples of writing about urgent issues in the most entertaining way possible; of teaching without talking down; and of a brilliant writer using her experience, together with great powers of intellect and observation, to sharply expose painful truths with love.

If you like David Foster Wallace's piercing of the cultural veil, Barbara Kingsolver's compassion, V.S. Naipul's wit and perspective, Tom Wolfe's breadth and ability to see through all factions, Catch-22's revelation of social insanity through his style of writing, or Jane Austen's straight-faced revelations of hilarious absurdity, then this might turn out to be one of your favorite books, too.

Rating:
Summary: White Teeth: A novel of epic proportions
Review: I both hated and loved this book.

First, I was amazed at the writing, and Zadie Smith's breadth of knowledge. She is obviously extremely talented. Unfortunately, these two things are not enought for me. If I hadn't had to read the book for a reading club, I would have never finished it, which brings me to to what I disliked about the book.

I hated the fact that I couldn't stand any of the characters; I didn't empathize with them. Perhaps this is because I am a white American, far removed from the London Zadie Smith writes of, but I doubt it. I don't think that she (the writer) likes any of her characters, except for perhaps Irie, the only character that actually develops during the course of the novel. At one point early in the book, I thought to myself that Zadie Smith must be a rather mean person to describe so many people so hatefully.

The thing I disliked most about the book was its unnecessary length. While the basic story was good, and even interesting, I often found myself wanting to skip through pages and pages to the next thing that moved the story forward. There were too many pointless dialogues and lengthy background passages.

Rating:
Summary: It's about the people
Review: Ok, so you've heard the hype about Zadie Smith, the "preternaturally gifted writer", the young woman who received a 750,000 pound advance on 80 pages of this book when she was only 21! You know she's dazzling and that the literary world is in love with her. So what? Don't critics get all excited about all kinds of terrible books? Aren't the people who say Zadie Smith is brilliant very likely huge fans of John Knowles's "A Separate Peace"? Yes, yes, and yes.

I am not one of those people. I love intelligent, entertaining, open-minded, passionate, and beautiful books. White Teeth is all of those things and has even added a new category: meandering non-narrative gushing. Now I like that too.

I won't do plot synopsis, because you can get that elsewhere, and besides, White Teeth's plot is not relevant. It really hardly matters at all. This book is, dare I say, a character story. It's about the people, not events. Normally this is what defines "literary fiction" from "pulp fiction". In Smith's case, it's really more of a juxtaposition. Her characters aren't extraordinary. They are definitely warped, but no more than the people who live on the periphery of your own life. They are the passionate "commonfolk", like me and perhaps you as well. They are egotists and they are awful and horrible and lovable and funny and frightening and uplifting...all at different times and always believably. Zadie Smith is a writer who understands people. And clearly she loves them. Even her most irascible characters are imbued with a genuine desire for goodness, no matter how divergent their idea of goodness may be from the next person. In the post-9/11 world, this kind of disparate uniformity is very necessary. In fact, many of her characters are Muslims and a couple are even militants. Smith offers a glimpse of such a culture and compels us to love the kind people who we are being told to hate.

Smith's story is interesting only insofar as it provides more understanding of the people in the book. Most times I opened it, I felt like one who goes to a friend's house, not to do anything in particular, but just to watch the oddness and craziness of the family. The book is fun, smart, and you get the sense that its author really cares about people in a way that is refreshing in the world of literary pomposity. Most great literary achievements are all about the author, and the critics who praise Zadie Smith would like this to be no exception. In my estimation Smith diverges from earlier artistic triumphs by asserting the ascendancy of her characters above herself at each turn.

Read and savor this book, not because it's a critical success, but because it's a thing of beauty to be treasured and remembered.