Product Description

One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2842 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Epic in scale and intimate in approach, White Teeth is an ambitious novel. Genetics, eugenics, gender, race, class and history are the book's themes but Zadie Smith is gifted with the wit and inventiveness to make these weighty ideas seem effortlessly light.

The story travels through Jamaica, Turkey, Bangladesh and India but ends up in a scrubby North London borough, home of the book's two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal. They met in the Second World War, as part of a "Buggered Battalion" and have been best friends ever since. Archie marries beautiful, buck-toothed Clara, who's on the run from her Jehovah's Witness mother, and they have a daughter, Irie. Samad marries stroppy Alsana and they have twin sons: "Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks."

Big questions demand boldly drawn characters. Zadie Smith's aren't heroic, just real: warm, funny, misguided and entirely familiar; reading their conversations is like eavesdropping. A simple scene, Alsana and Clara chatting about their pregnancies in the park: "A woman has to have the private things--a husband needn't be involved in body business, in a lady's ... parts."

Samad's rant about his sons--"They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from what I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave--acutely displays "the immigrant fears--dissolution, disappearance" but it also gets to the very heart of Samad.

White Teeth is a joy to read. It teems with life and exuberence and has enough cleverness and irreverent seriousness to give it bite. --Eithne Farry

Review
In the last two decades, what this novel describes as the 'great ocean-crossing experiment' has added a whopping dose of fertiliser to British literature, enabling it to flower as never before. And now, with Smith's impressive debut, there are signs of fresh growth. Smith's disillusioned men, frustrated women and torn teenagers are 'midnight's grandchildren', for whom cultural meltdown, segregation and reinvention are recurring themes. Her narrative charts the tragi-comic progress of Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones from World War II to 1990s London. It's here, amid the caffs and tikka restaurants of Willesden that both men settle and found families - Archie with the Afro-Carribean Clara, and Samad with Alsana, from his native Bengal. And it is here that their assorted offspring do battle with the expectations and hypocrisies of their elders and the seductive lure of fundamentalism. Smith's habit of switching protagonists almost in mid-stream gives the book a directionless feel, but what the novel lacks in narrative drive it makes up for in humour, verve and stylistic playfulness. And while Smith's intelligent, feisty prose style bears more than a passing resemblance to Salman Rushdie's, the territory she lays claim to is her own. A writer to watch. (Kirkus UK)

An impressively witty satirical first novel, London-set, chronicling the experiences of two eccentric multiracial families during the last half of the 20th century. When Archie Joness suicide attempt on New Years Day 1975 is stymied by a finicky butcher (who frowns upon such things taking place in a car parked illegally in front of his establishment, especially when hes awaiting an early morning delivery), his life is changed forever. Lamenting the break up of his marriage, the distraught and disoriented Archiea middle-aged Brit who fancies himself in the direct-mail business but actually spends his life folding papersthen wanders into an end-of-the-world party where he meets his next wife. Jamaican Clara Bowden is 19 to Archies 47, at six feet tall she towers over him, and shes missing all her upper teeth, the result of a motorcycle mishap. Nonetheless, six weeks later the mismatched pair are married and living near Archies WWII buddy Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim. And so begins Smiths frenetic, riotous, unruly tale, which hops, skips, and jumps from one end of the century to the other while following the Jones and Iqbal broods. Archie and Clara have a daughter, Irie, whose name translates into ``no problem' (although she has plenty of them); Samad, who is head waiter at an Indian restaurant, has twin sons, Millat and Magid. When theyre nine, their father separates the boys, sending Magid back to Bangladesh to be raised the old-fashioned way, far from the corruption of postwar London, filled with its mods and rockers and hippies and Englishmen and other bad influencesincluding Samad himself, who has been lusting after his twins schoolteacher. There isnt much of a plot here, the book being swept along by a series of sometimes hilarious, oft-times clever, occasionally tedious riffs on everything from race relations through eugenics and on to religion, but 25-year-old Smith is a marvelously talented writer with a wonderful ear for dialogue. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
One of the most talked about fictional debuts of recent years, "White Teeth" is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.

Customer Reviews

Still laughing
I first read this book when it was released and have to say, it's one of my favourites. Smith works away from the typical attitude of authors when it comes to talking about multi-culturism... in other words she's not scared to 'offend'. The book is absolutely hilarious and my favourite from her, compared to her other books. Her characters are there to hate and love all at the same time, and her storylines full of bittersweet humour...

A definite must read... I am gutted till this day to have missed the TV adaptation of this ....

Not the best read
I have read all three of Zadie Smith's books, mainly because I wanted to know what all the hype was about. I have just finished reading White Teeth and I have suddenly got it: in White Teeth Zadie Smith tries very hard to be like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Satanic Verses: the language, epic style, the flashbacks to legendary times, the numerous characters; only the magical aspect of Rushdie's first books is left out.

My own childhood was quite rich multiculturally speaking but I can't boast that it was as varied as Zadie Smith's North London. And yet I was very disappointed with how Smith actually describes the mix of cultures and heritages that Irie, Magid and Millat grow up in. She doesn't work on developing the issue and sticks to stereotypes. I don't know whether she wasn't brave enough or didn't give enough of herself.

The characters are all obviously archetypical but she left out a lot of interesting details, dwelling more on monotonous issues (more to the point: they were monotonous in the book) or people: Samad and Archie's experience in the war and Marcus' work on genetics are quite boring and long episodes. The Chalfens on the other hand, representing the ignorant, prejudiced and condescending white Europeans are a ridiculous, unrealistic and uninteresting addenda. Clara and Irie - who are the really interesting people - are nearly not developed at all.

My advice to anyone thinking of buying this book: read Midnight's Children instead. It's much more poignant and genuine. If you want books on family sagas with loads of characters, head for García Márquez. You will save yourself time and gain entertainment and enrichment.

How history works
This is the kind of book that gives multi-culturalism a good name. It isn't preachy or pius, it's just content to be profound and funny and readable. Above all it is Irie's story. Her older relatives share the big immigrant fear, disappearance, the nightmare where birthplace and belonging become meaningless accidents. But to young Irie, this feels like freedom. You can't escape your history, your shadow. But roots can be too too long, tortuous and deep, and in the end will have to be ignored and denied. Thus history progresses. All this comes as a bonus. The humour and humanity alone are worth the read.