Product Description

One of the most talked about fictional débuts 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: #9948 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

From the Publisher
What the reviewers have said:
"Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, from the thirteenth place in a long-ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what here turned out to be. It's an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by WHITE TEETH, and often impressed. It has ... bite." Salman Rushdie

"A brilliantly written and hugely inspiring book - buying it should go straight to the top of your New Year's resolution list." Red Magazine, (Top three reads)

"Smith perfectly captures the angst of life in an alien culture and, despite the seriousness of her theme, she can be wickedly funny. You'll laugh out loud...the entire book is speckled with lighter manifestations of cross-culture quirks...Above all, Smith has created a cast of characters that leaps off the page and keeps you engrossed to the surprising denouement." Livewire

"WHITE TEETH is no acne-ridden teenage tragedy. Zadie Smith presses all the right buttons in modern, multicultural Britain, easily and unpreachily." Evening Standard

"Smith can write. Her novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters; it is blissfully free of the introversion and self-consciousness detail that mar many first novels. Smith has stories to tell and, in the tradition of Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, she gets on with them; the dialogue is pitch perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed." Daily Telegraph

"This is an ambitious first novel, and she pulls it off magnificently, bringing all the characters and ideas together in a farcical denouement; the weighty themes are easily and humorously handled...an outsatnding novel, refreshingly upbeat and deserving of all the attention it is getting." Evening Standard

"This is a strikingly clever and funny book with a passion for ideas, for language and for the rich tragi-comedy of life...It is her ebullient, simple prose and her generous understanding of human nature that make Zadie Smith's novel outstanding. It is not only great fun to read, but full of hope. Written by a member of a generation described by the author herself as "children with first and last names on a great collision course", the reader is encouraged to look forward, like Irie Jones, to 'a time, not far from now, when roots won't matter any more.'" Sunday Telegraph

About the Author
Zadie Smith was born in North West London in 1975 and continues to live in the area. She is currently working on a second novel.

Customer Reviews

Grudging Respect
This massive first novel is both wildly ambitious and desperately in need of the hand of an assured editor. Smith certainly isn't afraid to stir such minor topics as race, colonialism, class, gender, culture, religion, fate, sexuality, history and science into her melting pot examination of identity, and as such, it's one of those books whose plot cannot be succinctly outlined. In the broadest possible terms, the book revolves around Archie and Samad, an Englishman and Bangladeshi respectively, who are in the same tank unit in World War II. After spending a goodly chunk of time on their wartime experience, the book covers both the next 45 years of their lives (lengthy stops are made in the late '60s, '70s, and '80s), and with the past (flashbacks are made to mid-19th century India and Jamaica). The true protagonists are Archie's daughter Irie, and Samad's twin sons, Millat and Majid. And the central theme of the book is their struggle for identity, which is sometimes unconscious and sometimes very purposeful.

One of the book's main flaws is that in addition to these five major characters, there are the mothers of each, and a veritable wagonload of important supporting characters, including a third family that appears well into the book. There's a lot of coming and going and coming, and on and on as characters assume central importance for ten pages, only to disappear for two-hundred. Smith is trying to weave a very complicated web (many critics call this aspect of the book "Dickensian"), but in doing so, the transitions become awfully jarring, and very often, annoying. A second major issue is that the characters are all types of one sort or another. Smith sets them in motion in order to comment on her grab-bag of issues, but never quite gives them enough individuality or humanity. The good thing is that she does manage to create a unique voice for each . Like Martin Amis, she's has an excellent ear for the rhythms of conversation and the specific vernaculars of both time and group. Similarly, she likes to play with language in a way that is both refreshing and assured.

On the whole, I liked this book-albeit grudgingly. Smith has taken a kind of "throw everything except the kitchen sink at the wall and see what sticks" approach, leaving no major issue unturned in her attempt to leave her mark on the reader. This means that a lot of the threads never lead anywhere, and thus the overall effect is not as strong as she might have intended. A good editor might have been able to pare some elements back a bit, allowing others to blossom more. Similarly, an editor ought to have helped with some of the many inaccuracies that crop up (two random examples: some of the portrayal of the Jehovah's Witnesses is factually incorrect, as are some of the details of Ryan's scooter). Still, as a portrait of multicultural London over the years and how the concept of "being British" has evolved in that time, it works quite well. And its questions about identity and belonging are applicable to immigrants coming to any Western country. The book was made into a 4-hour BBC miniseries, which has still never been released on video in the US.

Don't put this off as long as I did!
I never liked the front cover. And I had a vague suspicion that this was just more over-hyped and under-talented chick lit. So I avoided this book deliberately until I had nothing else on the shelf I hadn't read and was about to go on holiday...

Cut to Day 1 of holiday where husband is becoming more and more irritable about my utter absorption into this book and people keep staring at me when I burst out laughing.

Fortunately for them, White Teeth was so totally meserising that I finished it that same day! My expectations were low but this turned out to be a real gem. The characters were so real I was sad when the end came and I was faced with never hearing more about them.

Without a doubt the best book I read all year.

Put this one at the top of your shopping list.
'White Teeth' follows the roots of the lives of three families living in West London; the Iqbals, the Jones' and the Chalfens. With an interesting concoction of cultures, ranging from the Radio-4-listening, herbal-tea-drinking Chalfens, to the Bengali, strict muslim Iqbals, Zadie Smith generates a colourful and exciting picture of West London.

Dipping into the ancestry of characters along the way, 'White Teeth' provides humorous, well-rounded and thoughtful accounts of all of its protagonists. Smith is an insightful and intelligent author, whose quips and descriptions could arouse emotion even in the most cold-hearted of readers. A truly gripping read.