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"Whilst he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position
of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger-moth's diaphanous
wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit
Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie."
This is a first class debut
novel, which has made the news due to the huge advance, which the author
received - a six-figure number. So, the question seems to be: is White
Teeth worth all that money? The answer has to be YES.
White Teeth is a brilliant novel, superbly confident in
its execution. It starts off in 1975, the year of the author's birth,
with the attempted suicide of Archibald Jones. Anyone who was born in
1970s Britain cannot fail but identify with the characters and events in this
book. If you can recall the VW badge craze, then this is the book
for you. However, this is not just a novel for the younger generation,
for there is at least one extended family in White Teeth, each member of which
is brought vividly to life. There's Archibald Jones and Samed Iqbal, who
first meet in a British tank in 1945, and who then meet up again thirty years
later to start the families featured within White Teeth. There's the
brilliant and comic portrayal of the aged Hortense Bowden, an avid Jehovah's
Witness, who keeps waiting for the end of the world.
Zadie
Smith's novel has been described as Dickensenian, but I think there's a touch
of Thackeray in there too. The author mocks her characters, and parodies
them, but she also has a lot of compassion for them. No one, in the world
of White Teeth, is beyond redemption. Zadie Smith's characters are truly
vibrant. Take Samed Iqbal and his troubles with 'slapping the
salami'. As a reader, you begin to wonder how Zadie Smith has such
insight into the male mind and universe, because it rings so true.
For anyone
embarking on a Cultural Studies course, this novel is a must. Throw away
your textbooks with their dry statistics! One of White Teeth's main
themes is the mix of cultures in North London, from the Bengali Iqbals, to the
archetypal Englishman Archie Jones, to the half-Jamaican Bowdens, and a slight
smattering of the Irish. The novel maps these characters as they try to
live out their years in a world which is losing religion and tradition.
Samed kidnaps one of his sons to be brought up as a proper Bengali back home,
while his other son, Millat, flirts with girls and joins the fundamentalist
Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (KEVIN - they've got an
acronym problem).
History
and fate are intermingled in this novel. Hortense Bowden's apocalyptic
vision of the future is indivisibly linked to the aftershocks of her
birth. Samed can't stop boring people with tales of his illustrious
ancestor, the rebellious Mangal Pande. Irie Jones seeks to visit her
family's home of Jamaica. And Joyce Chalfen sees genius in each
Chalfen portrait, whilst Joshua Chalfen literally joins up with FATE.
Archie Jones, who leaves most decisions to the flick of a coin, also finds
that History has a nasty shock in store for him. However, the future's
present here also, with Marcus Chalfen's work on genetics forming a pivotal
part of the plot.
Like
BBC TV's 'Our Friends in the North', White Teeth is divided up amongst a
handful of years relevant to the characters. So, you can wallow in
nostalgia as you see the Berlin Wall fall down once more, relive of the turmoil
of that October 1987 storm, and remind yourself of the Bradford protest against
The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie's review of White Teeth is the only
bit of marketing on the front cover, and indeed, Zadie Smith has been compared
favourably with Rushdie.
There are quite a few pop
culture allusions scattered throughout the novel, but I doubt that these will date,
as they tend to be of the immortal kind (references to 'Taxi Driver', and
'Goodfellas'). The plot of another gangster movie, 'Miller's Crossing',
seems to reflect Archie Jones' dilemma. But please don't point any
tedious accusations of theft in Zadie Smith's direction. She has her
own, extremely witty, voice as a writer, and White Teeth comes very much
from her perspective. It seems that Zadie Smith has been writing this
novel for a very long time: witness the similarity of the characters and story
in Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private Tutor, a
story short she wrote for the Cambridge May Anthologies in 1997.
There are only a few jarring
notes. Smith has a tendency to write aesthetic words such as
'monstropolous', when there's really no need to do it, other than maybe showing
off. Having said that, you try looking up ‘monstropolous’ in
any online dictionary, and you’ll have drawn a blank. But if you look up references to the word on the net, then
it points all the way to Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘Their Eyes were Watching
God’. Hurston’s writing was
rediscovered and promoted by Alice Walker in the 70s, and this novel is credited
by many for being the first novel in which Southern U.S. Blacks are portrayed
as being independent from White society.
Once you consider the provenance of ‘monstropolous’, there can be no
possible objection to Zadie Smith’s prose. What had once seemed intrusive, now has a power all its
own. If a single word could tell a
story, then ‘monstropolous’ is it.
My first impression was wrong.
There are no discordant notes.
The music is sublime.
AuthorTrek Rating:10/10.
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
