White Teeth (Penguin Essentials)

The prose is beautiful as is the messaging. Many of the characters don't redeem themselves, which is probably better. That said, it took me a long time to get through for some reason. I'd definitely suggest the book, however.

Zadie wields a masterful prose and displays an uncanny ability to capture the essence of her diverse and complex characters. She is especially precise in capturing the immigrant experience. Excellent work!

Kind of a mess as the author intorduces more characters than s/he chose to develop. Long discourses on Muslim morality seem contradict the actions.of the Muslim characters, whose experience in a multi-culture society overshadow those of African-Caribbeans. Better to have stuck w/ 1 or the other. The Jewish family gives the.story coherence as well as comic relief.

Amazing story covering lots, lots of social issues. I found it hard to read as it didn't flow due to changing of viewpoints written from each character. Great read, though, to discuss with someone. Sadly, 6 people in my Discussion group gave up after a couple of chapters and I had no one to discuss it wit! It would make a great movie.

An unforgettable book. Zadie Smith brings us into the lives of immigrants and how they interact among themselves, the taboos and habits they bring with from their country of origin and how they interact with the native English population. A great book. Zadie Smith should earn a nobel prize.

There is much humor in this complex story about the challenges mixed races face in daily living. The pace of the book is steady but keeps one's interest because you cannot possibly guess what situation the characters have to deal with around the next corner. A brilliant twisted story!

Amazing story covering lots, lots of social issues. I found it hard to read as it didn't flow due to changing of viewpoints written from each character. Great read, though, to discuss with someone. Sadly, 6 people in my Discussion group gave up after a couple of chapters and I had no one to discuss it wit! It would make a great movie.

An unforgettable book. Zadie Smith brings us into the lives of immigrants and how they interact among themselves, the taboos and habits they bring with from their country of origin and how they interact with the native English population. A great book. Zadie Smith should earn a nobel prize.

There is much humor in this complex story about the challenges mixed races face in daily living. The pace of the book is steady but keeps one's interest because you cannot possibly guess what situation the characters have to deal with around the next corner. A brilliant twisted story!

I read the reviews and, naively, bought the book based on these. I confess that I only read it half-way through. First I thought it was quite amusing and that Archie was going to be a good character study. Also Clara and Alsana promised to be interesting. But Archie sort of disappeared into the background while his friend Samad took over and gradually I became bored with all of them, especially with Samad's lectures and lamentations. As another reviewer said, I put the book down and didn't feel like taking it up again. Perhaps someday I might try, but there are more interesting books around.

Overall, It was an interesting book and was unlike anything I have ever read. The conflict between the characters became intense and kept you on the edge of your seat. However there were parts that became boring, but the story flowed well. I would recommend this book to anyone that is looking for book to read casually.

In principle, Smith is a good writer and the book is a masterpiece. However, it is so boring that I had to fight the temptation to throw it away before finishing it every time I though to continue.

Like one reviewer notices, just as you get interested in one person and their actions, the author is off to another person or topic. In some books it works because the writer is able to engage you. Smith does not. You have to constantly fight to engage yourself and not fall asleep.

Good luck plodding through it.

Was very disappointed, not what I expected, the writing was good but the subject did not hold me. I left the UK 40 years ago and could not connect to the subject matter, maybe an age thing for me as I'm 79 years old.

I was anticipating a clever, intellectual style of writing from Smith, but found the book to be a jumbled mess of uninteresting characters and a poorly developed plot. I put it down several times refusing to read any further, but it just bugged me not to finish it. By the end, I was really angry that I wasted my time. The author has very brief moments of clarity or interesting thought, but the book continuously slips back into banality. There's nothing even remotely humorous about it. It's just dull, disjointed (in the last paragraph, out of nowhere, the author addresses the reader directly??) and at times a bit crass for seemingly no good reason. A failed attempt at creating a deep and meaningful novel.

She writes so beautifully, but I found this book boring enough to just quit, which is unusual for me. She has great, graet potential & I sincerely hope that she will come up with a true masterpiece soon.

It's a well written never ending collection of stories. Very funny and entertaining but at the same time annoyingly unreadable. Took me a long time to finish this book - was hoping to have liked it. What with the familiar immigrant story and an identity crisis with immigrant children. I'm sad to give this book 3 stars but this seems accurate.

I enjoyed this original and interesting novel. It's amusing to the point where I laughed out loud ( a rare occurrence while reading), and yet themes are serious enough to give readers something to consider, to think about. It's worth reading.

There’s lots to like about WHITE TEETH, which was published in 2000 when Zadie Smith was a mere 25 years old. And there is, for the lazy, an extensive entry on Wikipedia for this remarkable novel, which this reviewer consulted occasionally. This post provides a detailed discussion of the plot, themes, and characters of WHITE TEETH. But it strangely fails to mention the outstanding features of this book, which are Smith’s verbal energy, precision, and versatility. Want some examples?

o “Samad was dimly aware that he looked out of sorts. Earlier that evening he had put a tiny line of the white stuff on the insides of his eyelids. The morphine had sharpened his mind to a knife edge and cut it open. It had been a luscious, eloquent high while it lasted, but then the thoughts thus released had been left to wallow in in a pool of alcohol and had landed Samad in a malevolent trough.”

o “She was what you would call effortlessly pretty. About twenty-eight, maybe thirty-two at most. Slim, but not at all hard bodied, and with a curved ribcage like a child; long, flat breasts that lifted at their tips, an open-necked white shirt, some well-worn Levi’s and gray sneakers, a lot of dark-red hair swished up in a sloppy ponytail. Wispy bit falling at the neck. Freckled. A very pleasant, slightly goofy smile that she was showing Samad right now.”

o “It was his fourth trip to the attic in so many days, ferrying the odds and ends of a marriage out to his new flat, and the Hoover was one of the last items he reclaimed—one of the most broken things, most ugly things, the things you demand out of sheer bloody-mindedness because you have lost the house. This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.”

Despite Smith’s great literary talent, there are, in my opinion, aspects of WHITE TEETH that are beyond the purview of readers who are not Brits. For example, the character Archie Jones, a working-class mediocrity and turbid thinker, didn’t make sense to this Yank, although he probably borders on stereotype for the English reader. Likewise, the concept of Chalfenism—social obtuseness mingled with extreme Oxbridge rationality—satirized something that’s beyond my experience. Maybe if I was friendly with scientists and professors…

But, enough caviling! This is a fine book, often very funny, and well worth your while to read.

Recommended!

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is an imaginative adventure into the lives of many diverse Englanders during a span of multiple generations. Through the use of many narrators, Smith gives us the opportunity to see through the eyes of a diverse set of people and understand the world of London through their eyes. It is through these lenses that we see popular stereotypes portrayed in these characters everyday lives, one of the novel’s most prominent themes.

We see characters judging other characters for reasons such as physical appearance, religion, race, class, age, education, etc. We see many instances of the characters making subconscious judgements of other people, something we all are guilty of and can relate to. It is this relation that is the true eye-opener; many times throughout the novel I caught myself saying, “Wow… I’ve made that misconception before… Wow, I’ve thought that about someone before…” In our everyday lives, it is easy to judge the people around us simply from looking at them, and in White Teeth, Zadie Smith attempts to draw attention to these misconceptions and reveal the diverse lives behind these false stereotypes. Smith does a wonderful job at taking these stereotypes and creating characters out of them—Irie, an African American single mother who doesn’t know who the father of her child is, and Millat, a boy of Indian descent becoming radicalized and committing an act of terrorism, just to name a few. But it is the progression of these characters as they develop into these popular stereotypes that is the real eye-opener, and in my opinion, the most charming quality of White Teeth.

Smith’s White Teeth is the explanation of how stereotypes are invalid and inaccurate. Let’s take, for example, Irie Jones. Irie is the child of Clara and Archie Jones, an African American woman and white man of low-status living in England. In the end, Irie becomes a single mother, unable to identify the father of her child. At face-value, we see Irie Jones, the African-American-single-mother-stereotype. Taking a deeper look, we see a small child raised in a mediocre education system, a kinky-haired girl surrounded by society’s perfect ideal image of the straight-haired girl, a girl who is never really loved in the way that she desires. Irie is so much more than her stereotype; there is so much more to her than meets the eye. It is this closer look into the ‘behind the scenes’ action that takes place inside of people that is the novel’s central theme, and precisely what I loved about the novel.

I must admit, though, the novel is not without flaws. For one, the ending is a real let-down, in my opinion. Smith spends 447 pages presenting the lives of these people and creating intricate stories for them, only to wrap the entire thing up in less than half a page with a rushed conclusion that doesn’t give the reader any sense of relief whatsoever. We are introduced to so many new characters in the last chapters, and we are given their backstories and are given a chance to just glimpse their face and learn their names, and then Smith ends it all so abruptly…. What was the point!? I found myself asking that same question a couple of times throughout the novel. What was the point of Samad’s love affair? What was the point of introducing us to Joely and Crispin, the animal activist couple? Why devote so much time to dead-ends, Zadie Smith?

White Teeth, in my opinion, deserves 4 stars because Zadie Smith has a brilliant mind and the theme she presents—stereotypes and their falsehoods—is a, dare I say, universal theme that many can resonate with. At the end of the day, this novel was an interesting read and sparked real-world analysis inside of my mind, a valuable outcome that not even a poor ending was able to thwart. I definitely recommend this novel to any reader seeking the kind of entertainment that makes you think and analyze the world around you.

I actually really enjoyed this! There's a large cast of characters so you do have to keep track of everyone. This makes the beginning third or so a bit of a slog but it's completely worth it. The whole book jumps back and forth in time and it's all brought together brilliantly in the end. Trust me, if you're struggling, the end is totally worth it. The writing is a bit dense (and not too flowery) so you also have to be prepared for that. Another bit I wanted to mention: the endless themes. This book deals with so many issues ranging from immigration and the immigrant experience to the ethics of genetic engineering. It's quite the compilation but somehow it all works together. One last thing: the teeth analogies. I LOVED this. Smith uses teeth as a way to express certain feelings and concepts throughout the book (for example, pulling out wisdom teeth), using our inherent connotations. This is done so artfully and beautifully.

The Final Verdict:
While it's a bit deep and dense in the first third, once you make it past that marker, the world truly opens up like a flower. The characters are well done and the ending makes remembering all the characters completely worth it.
4 stars

Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ is a first novel published in 2000 when the author was 25 years old. There is nothing about this novel to indicate that it is either a first novel or a novel written by someone 25 or under. It is an ambitious, confident novel possessing an exhilarating energy and a tone that is equal parts cocky and compassionate, linguistically playful, with an expansive social canvas.

With a backstory that traces all the way back to the nineteenth century and a narrative that ends on New Year’s Eve 1999, ‘White Teeth’ primarily focuses on the families of two men, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, who served in World War II together and remained lifelong friends. Archie is a relatively uneducated working class British lad, not very introspective and almost never a proactive initiator of events in his own life. Archie is an English Everyman, whose own personal religion, if it could be said that he has one, is a belief in Chance. A flip of the coin determines his fate as well as others around him on more than one pivotal occasion. Samad is a Pakistani Muslim who wears his heritage like a badge of injured pride. He will engineer his fate and that of his offspring. We will see that his carefully laid plans do have a way of backfiring with his sons. In the last few weeks of WW II, when Archie and Samad don’t even realize the war has ended yet and they are the sole survivors of the killing of their tank crew in circumstances in which Chance has chosen to spare them, he makes a prediction:
“You will have dinner with my wife and I in the year 1975. When we are big-bellied men sitting on our money-mountains. Somehow we will meet.”

They do meet and end up living in the same London district. Forty years after the end of the war, however, neither man is sitting on a money-mountain. Archie’s claim to fame rests on his record of sharing thirteenth place in the 1948 Olympics with a Swedish gynecologist with whom he corresponds over the subsequent decades. Samad’s noble heritage rests on the fact that he is a great grandson of Mangal Pande, who fired the first shot in an aborted revolt against the British in 1857, almost a hundred years before Gandhi’s non-violent revolution helped liberate India. Forty years after the war, Archie folds and shuffles paper at a printing firm. Samad is the head waiter at an Indian restaurant.

Archie strays from the ethnic pool when he meets Clara Bowden, the product of a Jamaican mother and English father, at an End of the Year party, New Year’s Eve, 1974-75. Samad has had to wait for his bride of an arranged marriage to be born. Both men are significantly older than their spouses, each of whom becomes pregnant the same year. Archie and Clara produce a daughter, Irie, whose name means, “peaceful” or “no problem” in Clara’s Jamaican dialect. Samad and Alsana produce twin boys, Magid and Millat.

Archie felt that Chance brought him to Clara. Clara had shaken off her Jehovah’s Witness upbringing to embrace the charms of a boyfriend, a Mod named Ryan who drove a Vespa scooter and was a reincarnation of The Who’s Jimmy from ‘Quadrophenia’, a decade later. However, when Ryan meets Clara’s mother, the rebel adopts the mother’s cause and Clara is left without a boyfriend, without a tradition, and without her front teeth, which she lost in an accident riding with Ryan on his Vespa GS scooter.

Smith’s dental imagery is repeated with variations throughout the rest of the novel. Irie will accidentally stumble in the dark and knock over a glass of water, resulting in Clara’s false teeth biting her toes and revealing one of her mother’s secrets. There are extended flashback chapters referred to as “root canals”. There is a root canal for the friendship of Archie and Samad recounting their war experience. There is a root canal for the genealogical and racial origin of Clara’s mother, Hortense. There is also a root canal on Samad’s great grandfather, the hero of Bengali independence, Mangal Pande.

The ethnic and cultural streams will become further diluted in the next generation of Jones’s and Iqbal’s. Their daughter Irie is a mass of confusion, not clear on which identity she can safely claim as hers. She would like to pursue a more lucrative profession, become a scientist or a doctor, but will settle for dentistry. Samad, in a fit of guilt over succumbing to the temptation to an extramarital affair, blames his weakness on the corruption of Western culture. He is determined to ensure that the cultural integrity of his heritage should remain pure with at least one of his offspring. A self-imposed “Sophie’s choice” results in the maneuvered ‘kidnapping’ of his smarter son Magid back to the Old Country, to be brought up remotely in a pure Bengali Muslim environment by a family relative. Obviously, the plan does not unfold as Samad could ever predict. Millat, the remaining son, rejects his parents and becomes first a carousing, playboy slacker, before embracing a militant Muslim organization, Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation—KEVIN. If this name sounds a bit absurd, just consider that a group called ISIS is now probably the most threatening terrorist organization on the planet. Magid eventually returns but not as Samad had hoped. Magid is now a more-English-than-the-English secular humanist scientist with impeccable manners and a fearless search for scientific truth.

Millat and Irie both become involved with another family, the enlightened, liberal family of Marcus and Joyce Chalfen. The Chalfens and their brood of boys are an extremely self-involved family with a self-enclosed culture of their own. Marcus is a eugenicist; Joyce is a horticulturalist. They have even turned their name into a trademarkable label—“That is the Chalfen way.” They serve as a refuge for the alienated Millat and the restless Irie. The Chalfens are interesting and they are thematically essential. However, this second half of the novel is less engaging, more cartoonishly satirical than the Archie/Samad portions of the novel. I consider the dramatic core of the novel to be the relationship of Archie and Samad.

Having said that, Smith depicts an extremely diverse range of characters and environments and convincingly describes all of them. She also has a knack for capturing complex emotions in a succinct statement. Here are a few examples:
“He had seen her in his mind: a beautiful woman in a doorway with a come-hither look; and realized he regretted not coming hither.”
--Archie’s last conscious thoughts before his almost successful suicide attempt
“And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can’t. On both occasions, the man breathes.”
--Samad, on how a man accepts his fate
“Samad’s mouth had been the lone gunman on the grassy knoll that day, killing off his brain and swearing itself into power all at the same time.”
--Samad, contemplating an extramarital affair
“Joyce flew into the room like a hippie comet, a great stream of black fringed velvet, caftan, and multiple silk scarves.”
--Joyce Chalfen making an entrance
“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.”
--Archie’s level of ease when discussing science.

The climax of the novel is dispatched in a rushed pace which seems at odds with the leisurely way Smith has told the story for the preceding 400 pages. However, these reservations are fairly minor and do not dilute the impact of this audacious novel about a culture, or rather conglomeration of cultures of people that I had not encountered very often. Smith’s ambition in encapsulating the lives of a broad swath of characters resembles Dickens and Balzac in some respects. She has written “the great modern, multicultural British novel”, if one wants to toss around such a pretentious phrase. When asked, she claimed she wasn’t aware that she was writing a multicultural novel at all. She was just writing of the world of her young adulthood. Smith herself is the product of a Jamaican mother and British father, born around the same time in the mid-70’s as Irie Jones. Despite a few weaknesses which occur in novels written by much older veterans with multi-volume outputs trailing along behind them, ‘White Teeth’ is an impressive novel, even more impressive when seen as a first novel, and more impressive still when one considers the author’s age.