UPDATE: This review is from 2007, when I first read the book. I’ve since revised my view of the book and have it on my top 100.
Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
White Teeth‘s nonlinear plot revolves around first two and eventually three families in London. The first two include a Bengali couple (Samad and Alsana) and their twin boys and a Jamaican wife (Clara) and sad-sack English husband (Archie) and their culturally conflicted daughter; when two of the three kids get into trouble at school, they’re shuffled off to tutoring at the house of a dementedly rationalist English family (the Chalfens) with an almost Stepfordish devotion to cheerful reason. The novel opens with Archie’s attempt at suicide, which fails (obviously) and leads to his introduction to Clara, and then careens from story to story, time period to time period, jumping ahead to show how first the parents and then the kids are dealing with the assimilation challenges of a multicultural society, all set against a backdrop of an unfeeling Western society that erodes cultural traditions.
When Smith gets rolling, her dialogue is outstanding and she displays a broad wit ranging from wordplay (the Chalfen family’s “Chalfenisms”) to clever turns of phrase (“Archie says Science the same way he says Modern, as if someone has lent him the words and made him swear not to break them”) to bathroom humor and even the occasional bit of slapstick. Her dialogue doesn’t cut out all of the mundane realities of actual dialogue, giving it a flavor of realism that so many postmodern novels lack, and she shows off a sense of economy when she uses the characters’ words to give the reader more insight into their characters – Archie’s regular use of the outdated phrase “I should cocoa!” being the most frequent example.
Her wizardry with words has its limits, however. The book is loaded with literary allusions which are nearly always identified for the reader, giving them a showy feel (“Look how well-read I am!”) and robbing them of some of their power, while the one time she does use an allusion and doesn’t spell it out – to a controversial novel published in the 1980s – the distraction is gone and the power of the conversation takes over. There’s also a bit of sloppiness throughout the book – such as the time she uses the name of one twin in a conversation about his brother – as well as one major plot element that is wildly unrealistic, when without his wife’s knowledge, Samad sends one of his preteen sons to Bangladesh to prevent him from becoming too Westernized. I’m sorry, I understand that this is a plot device, but when Alsana didn’t castrate her husband after finding out he had kidnapped one of her sons and sent him halfway around the world, it put a bit of a hole in the book’s credibility.
Where White Teeth really shines, however, is in its use of metaphor and symbolism, in a way rarely seen in postmodern literature, betraying (in a good way) that well-read background that Smith brings to the table. Teeth – real, missing, or fake, although surprisingly never gold – appear all over the book, with their presence or absence standing in for the connections between various characters and their pasts; several chapter titles refer to the “root canals” of characters. The battle over the genetic engineering of a mouse – a major plot element in the book’s last third that isn’t even introduced before the two-thirds mark – stands in for some of White Teeth‘s recurring themes, like tradition versus modernity, or racism and the post-racial society. The novel is bold and ambitious, so despite some structural flaws (like the massive changes in plot direction, almost as if Smith changed her mind partway through) and the above-mentioned sloppiness, it works both as a good read and a work of literature.