white teeth by zadie smith

[meikuree]

finished White Teeth (2000). I would give it a 8.5/10. a masterclass in writing about immigration without reducing a story to immigrant cliches. (even if I did not care much for the recurring spiels on history as ball-and-chain -- not because I disagree but because that was the most 'borrowed' part of the book.) part of that is because it's wall-to-wall, 24/7, hardcore satire and political commentary. it doesn't make the quest towards representation and stop there; I felt like I learned something new about London's sociopolitical nuances even reading this in 2025. the other part is also that, thank god, Smith is able to write about a great latitude of lives that are not her own. I liked her awareness of WW2 history, The Great Partition, the Kingston earthquake, Jehovah Witness cultism, English colonialism in the Caribbean, new-gen Islamic fundamentalists, and more. she is very very observant. what was not so great: her impressionistic and at times stereotypical sketches of Bangladesh. 

the ending was what-the-hell, but I expected that going in, and it was formally innovative enough that I enjoyed reading just for the experience. I was astonished afterwards to learn that Zadie Smith wrote it when she was 23 - 25! also, the way she described her own writing is hysterical:

When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.

the book drew natural comparisons to Charles Dickens, but I also wonder about the connection between hysterical realism (the genre this book gets labelled with along with Thomas Pynchon and Infinite Jest) and psychological realism, a la George Eliot. I thought that would've been where hysterical realism got its name from, to be honest. shows how little I know. Smith's cited Middlemarch as one of her favourite novels, and I would connect some dots between George Eliot's style and hers. I'm 100% getting details wrong but:

• George Eliot is somewhat Spinozist and humanist in her attitude to the chains of causality in her novels. a frequent pattern is the way she takes fairtytale-esque tropes, plots, and motifs and then gives a perfectly plausible in-universe explanation for events that characters perceive to be supernatural, magical, or theological occurrences (e.g., a miser thinks his hoard of gold coins has inexplicably transformed into a baby; the novel explains how the baby got there through a bunch of funny accidents). most characters are drawn sympathetically, even those who would be villains in another type of novel. no transcendent evil or good design exists; the world simply proceeds by the patchwork accumulation of mundane human acts and efforts.
• White Teeth is split into two levels. on the level of the way the characters behave and think, they all think they're history's marionettes and sometimes lament its inescapability, its inexorability, etc. but on the level of the narration, Smith takes great pains to show that what they call 'history' was yes, events they could never change, but also a present woven through the concentration of their many forgettable little decisions, actions, and circumstances.

this I think helps Smith suspend her characters away from being hapless victims of history or Great Historical Men, two extremes which don't do justice to how history is felt, metabolised, or effected in real/everyday life. particularly by ex-colonial subjects of the Commonwealth, and elsewhere! I'm circling around the point I really want to make; I think the takeaway is that there is no great teleological line along which history or colonialism develops (even though there are characters obsessed with Great Historical Events), no grand orchestrating hand, and still there's both awful tragedy and comedy in that history. there's also still something you could recognisably term a great web of causality. it's just made by human hands, not divine ones. at the end of the day it's not the Great Events which shape everyday life but the diffused fallout from them & people's interpretations of them.

if I quote parts I liked from this I'll be here all day, so I'll list some things I found funny or appreciated with a rueful smile:

• the North London liberal bourgeois family, who were insufferable to me and worked as a scary, scary fictionalised example of the sort of British middle-class dysfunction that comes from being too-perfect white families; they felt like they were always only two steps removed from descending into rationalist eugenics
• the wide variety of caricature-breaking relationships to Islam depicted, which ring true to my experience: Muslims who drink alcohol but draw other lines like playing a gambling-free version of pinball, and British-born Muslims who somehow end up more fundamentalist than the people in their 'homelands' who can be a lot more relaxed about Islamic theology
• alongside this, a scene where a group of fundamentalists bicker over which translation of a Quran verse to use for a protest where (the narration notes this) unfortunately nobody will understand any Arabic they speak, such is the bankruptcy of England
• the conversation where North London liberal bourgeois mother (see above) asks a Bengali guest and her girlfriend if they use each other's breasts as pillows (the narration pointedly makes her out to be the misguided one), and also can't conceptualise being able to love women despite being a card-carrying feminist (correction: a very first-world one)
• and many others!

Comments

[queenlua]

i don't have much to add but wanted to say i really enjoyed this writeup, so thank you! my to-read list is pretty long at the moment but i am very Enticed & will be moving this one further up in the list; hoping i get to it sooner rather than later...!

[meikuree]

thank you, happy to hear you enjoyed! I'm actually reading The Last Samurai right now, sparked partly by your review, so this is a nice full circle moment... I absolutely hate the Helen DeWitt afterword you shared too, lmao, for the reasons you said!