White Teeth (2001)
4 Stars out of 5
Zadie Smith
448 pages
“What is past is
prolog.”
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith has written an amazingly good first book. It is a
novel written with humor and affection for the characters, of the pains felt by
the immigrant and non-immigrant people that inhabit this book, and it is a book
that takes a satirical gaze at the different viewpoints between the working
classes and middle classes in Great Britain. In short, it is an unorthodox
exploration of race and gender relations, and at the individual character level
it is a very clever view of expectations versus reality. It is as Time magazine
thought when they placed this novel amongst the best English-language novels
from 1923-2005, an excellent exploration of the human condition; all the more
remarkable as it came from a new author who wrote it at such a young age, 24.
Smith’s book covers a 135 year span of time, though it will
focus (with two significant exceptions) on the years from New Year’s Day 1975
to New Year’s Eve, 1992. On that New Year’s Day in 1975 a very disconsolate
Archibald Jones will be sitting in his car, thinking about a recent coin toss
he made and inhaling the car’s exhaust fumes that are slowly filling the car he is sitting in. He is disconsolate because his
first wife, a slightly mad Italian by the name of Ophelia has divorced him.
After 30 years of marriage, she will leave poor Archie with nothing more than
their broken Hoover vacuum cleaner. With these opening lines, the reader will
very rapidly be propelled into Smith’s style of humor and her recursive
narrative style. The sad state of Archie’s condition may not be comical to
every reader, but the ensuing scene where a local Halal butcher will run to
Archie’s car cannot fail to raise a smile on just about anyone’s face. The butcher is
not there to save Archie: no, he is upset because he needs the parking space
for his customers, and further, as he will repeatedly state, “he has no permit
for suicides in his parking lot”. The “blackness” of the humor Smith employs
here is slightly out of character for the book, but not her use of humor. She
will employ that extensively.
Archie’s comical reprieve will permit him to leave the butcher shop's parking lot and to wander dazedly to a
hippie commune where he will meet the love of his life, the beautiful Jamaican immigrant
teenager, Clara. Archie being at least twenty years older than Clara will via their marriage, over
the next 17 years provide a framework for Smith to discuss how the generational
and cultural differences between the working class Englishman and the equally
poorly educated Jamaican immigrant can, despite their dissimilarities still
find a way to bridge those differences in order to build a life. It may not be
the life Clara might have hoped for; because those differences are real and,
quite frankly they stem more from the age differences than the cultural ones.
Still, the bond is there and they will, through their union produce a lovely
being, their daughter, Irie. Irie (Jamaican for “no problem”) will become a
character axis of sorts that the overall story will revolve about.
Archie’s world also includes his similarly aged, friend from
their days in WWII (where they were part of a tank crew), Samad Iqbal. Samad acts the role of a devout
Muslim, but anyone would be forgiven for wondering at Samad’s definition of a
good Muslim. Samad will frequent with Archie an “Irish” pub owned by a Muslim
relative of Samad’s, Mickey. Samad and Archie will pass their evenings drinking
alcohol, but will (in Samads’ mind) make up for that lapse by not eating pork.
Samad will also engage in an extra-marital affair with his twin sons’ music
teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones. He will commit a number of other offenses that he feels
are affronts to Islam, but yet he will still continue to do. Samad will write
off his misbehavior by blaming the effects of English culture: “people call it assimilation
when it is nothing but corruption”. Samad feels he and his boys are being
corrupted by their new homeland, yet of course as "bad" as England is, returning to Bangladesh is not
really an option that is for even a moment ever considered.
Samad has like Archie has a wife that is a generation
younger than him, Alsana. She is unlike Clara something of a thorn in the side of
her husband (well, pretty much everyone’s side; she is quite prickly). She was
not so difficult though that she and Samad could not have any children; they
had twin boys, Millat and Magid (the elder by two minutes). That small degree of
seniority between Millat and Magid will play a large role in how Samad will
view each of them. Their different temperaments will also play a big role:
Millat will while in his early teens, be someone who wishes to be a gangster like his
heroes in “The Godfather” or “Goodfellas”, but will as he reaches his late teens turn to radical
Islam. His motivation seems more like an attempt to belong than anything else. Magid will be sent at age 10 to live in
Bangladesh for 8 years in order to become Samad's vision of a good Muslim; instead he will turn into an atheist/scientist that is more of an
Englishman in his views and manners than any of the standard born and bred Anglo-Englishmen that drive Samad so mad. (It is very hard to discern which of the two is the greater
disappointment to Samad.)
There are a host of other characters in the book: Clara’s
mother Hortense (born during an earthquake in Jamaica and a lifelong devote of
Jehovah Witnesses), an old boyfriend Ryan who will throw off Clara to join
Hortense in the JW’s, several aged Jamaicans that frequent Mickey’s
establishment along with Archie and Samad, a Nazi/French doctor who plays a role
in Archie’s personal evolution (and makes an utterly unnecessary return in the climax), and most
significantly a Jewish/Catholic middle class family of scientist/atheists, the
Chalfens. Marcus Chalfen is the family’s patriarch and noted R&D biologist who will pull
Magid even further from Samad in terms of influencing him. Joyce Chalfen is the
mother and a noted author of horticulturist subjects. She will pull Millat away
(to some degree) from Samad and Alsana as she tries her horticultural/mothering
abilities in “fixing” the troubled Millat. The key point here is more how she
sees Millat as just another plant gone wrong: in her mind, all it will take is
a change of sunlight or watering schedule, and he will be good as new. The
satirical description by Smith of Joyce's failure to see the “immigrant” youth as a human as she busies
herself with their reclamation is hard to not notice. Marcus too has a project,
one even more ambitious, he intends to fix all of humanity and intends to show the
world his means to do so on New Year’s Eve, 1992 with his “super mouse”. That his grand
creation sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon is one more example of Smith’s
satirical wit.
Smith’s language is always entertaining in “White Teeth”,
but it is the themes she seeks to explore that are the book’s greatest
strengths. Her interest in the immigrant experience and how cultures interact
are clearly displayed and easily grasped. However, it is her sense of optimism that
underlays her storylines with that I find the most appealing. Consider the
following early description of Irie:
“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.”
To be sure, she uses a clever metaphor at the end of the description,
but it is the subtle joy Smith exudes in this passage that is most appealing; the sense that despite
the differences, everything will come out alright in the end. Smith is also such a
confident writer: it shows throughout this book right along with her sunny view
that hides beneath the black humor and satire that sometimes gloss over deeper
feelings. Smith seems to be saying that somewhere under these hybrid children
speaking their creole-like languages, there is hope for the future; a future
where tolerance will grow right alongside these 2nd generation kids.
One last note on themes and this comes from the book’s
title, “White Teeth”. Superficially, it is tempting to consider how all people regardless
of skin color (let alone religion) have teeth that are white. This
physical trait is one Smith explores a little in the manner of a teeth-related
several metaphorical sub-stories. In one, Clara loses her teeth in an accident, wears dentures and never tells
Irie. When Irie learns of this fact, she feels betrayed that her mother could
keep such a secret from her; as if Clara’s teeth were more an emblem of who Clara
was ,rather than merely a set of teeth, artificial or not. But it really seems
to me that it is the fact that teeth have roots far more than the color of
teeth that Smith makes better use of. Imagine how important roots are as a powerful
concept to the new immigrant. The first generation will throughout their life reach back to their youth
in the motherland to help establish their personal identity. Even the second
generation explores this concept as they wander in a confused state between
their roots in the new land and the old. Smith brilliantly alludes to this
point with a story involving Irie. Irie is a child of a white man and a black woman. She has a
bit of both her mom and dad in her physicality and her temperament. But the one
thing that compels Irie more than anything else at age 13 is her hair; her
kinky hair. Irie will spend an afternoon in (one of the book’s best described
moments) a Jamaican hair salon as she desperately tries to straighten her hair.
Smith wryly describes the lesson Irie learns from this event – it is a lesson
on many levels, not just the newly damaged hair level.
If we turn to manner in which Smith writes, it is the
structure of her various vignettes and her mastery of several sets of ethnic patois
and their particular colloquialisms that are the most impressive. By the time
the reader finishes this book, he or she will know in great depth and I think
with equal appreciation the particular beauty of lower class Jamaican and
Bengali English word usage. Smith will not limit herself to them though, as she
will pepper certain sections of the book with conversations by various Scots
and middle-class Englishmen and women. Such language is for the most part
particularly colorful and artistic, but it leads to two problems I had with
book: repetitive use of structure and a certain literary technique. I mentioned
above her use of a recursive technique (a flashback, if you prefer). Smith will
construct her entire book with many sequences that will have the same structure. They
begin for example with something like the one above with Archie: Archie in his
car contemplating his pending death, then a flashback that explains how Archie
got to this point, which will then segue back to Archie. With a more attentive
editor, I think Smith’s over-use of this technique would have been reduced; but
since she evidently lacked one or she had one with a starkly different point of
view from me, there are many (too many) such recursions. The book and its
length suffer for it.
The other structural complaint (and this is by far, my
biggest complaint) covers the same ground: overuse of a particular literary
technique. The technique in this case is Smith’s use of “speeches” by certain
of her characters. Taken by themselves as standalone scenes, these speeches are
often extremely witty and (sometimes) useful in explaining the characters’ backgrounds,
the story’s themes, and the book’s overall arc. Her themes and optimistic views
are the strength of this novel (and why I recommend it), but the overuse of the
various “speeches” and a too-convenient tying up of story lines for the climax
weaken the novel and why I do not give it the perfect score of 5 stars that I
would otherwise have given it.
I do recommend this book. It may go into excessive detail
over parts of the Islamic and Jehovah Witness religions, and it certainly has at least one too many prolonged speeches by Hortense, but it is a brilliant examination
of identity, multiculturalism, race and religion, and yes teeth (on several
levels – a grown Irie becomes a dentist!). There is a quality and spirit that I
love about this book. It may be a little too long, but it quite definitely
makes me want to look into one of the four additional books Smith has since
published. As I marveled over "White Teeth" what is a Smith of 40 and now a professor of English in an American
university have to say about man? I would really like to find out. In the meanwhile,
if you have not read “White Teeth”, I suggest you do so. You will be glad that
you did.
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