White Teeth. – Review – book review Black Issues Book Review, Sept, 2000 by Askhari Hodari

White Teeth by Zadie Smith Random House, May 2000, $24.95, ISBN 0-375-50185-1

Many people, whether they admit it or not, have thought about suicide–have wished, if only momentarily, they were dead. Archibald Jones, a forty-something white man who folds paper for a living, took his desire to the edge of fruition.

As the story begins, Archie is sitting locked in a car breathing noxious fumes and waiting for death’s doors to open. Instead of ending up in death’s arms, he falls into the long, graceful embrace of the beautiful Clara Bowden, a 19-year-old Jamaican Jehovah’s Witness who has lost her faith in God. Clara–who had abandoned the teachings of the society but “was not yet the kind of carefree atheist who could laugh near altars”–was running from a boyfriend who had befriended her mother and her god. Instead she settled for Archie, who had left behind the passion in his life long ago in favor of North London Security.

Their unlikely union brought about a daughter named Irie, patois for “everything okay, cool, peaceful, you know?” Clara strikes up an equally unlikely friendship of convenience with Alsana, the Muslim wife of Archie’s best friend, Samad Iqbal. Alsana is a woman who, despite her timidness in life, looks at things “dead straight between the eyes; an unflinching and honest stare, a meticulous inspection that would go beyond the heart of the matter to the marrow, beyond the marrow to the root–but the question is how far back do you want?”

Smith goes as far back as World War II where the patriarchs of her story first forms the bond of men locked in a life-and-death struggle none of them understands. She goes as far back as turn of the twentieth-century Jamaica and the circumstances which precede the birth of Clara’s mother who, in the throes of a Kingston earthquake, stands unwavering in her faith in God’s wrath on her unenlightened neighbors. She ventures to the marrow through the story of Pandie, Samads misbegotten revolutionary ancestor notable for both firing the shot which began a new phase in the Indian uprising against English colonialists as well as contributing his name to the English.

With the same literary leapfrog of grace, Smith moves forward to tell the story of Irie’s coming of age, along with Samad and Alsana’s twin sons, and their entanglement with the representative forces of pseudo-postmodernism and enlightenment.

None of her characters are typical and each is written with a multilateral depth that betrays a wisdom beyond Smith’s 24 years. And although some of the topics tackled in White Teeth are fundamental, such as religion, assimilation, intergenerational conflict, genetics and multiculturalism–their treatment is anything but. Smith offers us an optimistically urban and hilarious look at life through the eyes of some seriously funny characters.

If characterization is the strength of White Teeth, then plot is it’s greatest challenge. The climax is anticlimactic and attempts unsuccessfully to unite all the characters in an ending which reads falsely.

More than 400 pages in length, the book is large, but the concepts explored are larger still. Smith’s writing style multiplies the plot with each word. In the hands of a less generous editor, the novel might have had more focus. But, then again, we may have missed the daring and arrogance of an assured first-time novelist.

Askhari Hodari is the co-editor of Convictions, an anthology of prison writings, and the moderator of www.degriotspace.com, an online workshop for Afridiasporic writers.

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