In
this issue:
BOOKS
by Eileen
Frost
At age 21, Zadie Smith
wrote "White Teeth," a novel that sweeps across cultures
and continents, bringing alive the contemporary multi-cultural
London scene. Now it is in paperback.
And
Consider This
Summer is usually associated
with swimming holes, Fourth of July parades and lemonade stands
but literary fans can find events that center around their favorite
authors such as Faulkner, Hemingway and Twain.
Books
White Teeth, by
Zadie Smith.
Random House, c2000,
$24.95; Knopf , $14.95, paperback, 2001.
How pleasant it is
to have long summer days ahead of us, promising opportunities
for restorative reading, amusement, and reflection. Even better
to find that just in time, a perfectly wonderful, often funny
novel appears in paperback June 12. That novel is "White
Teeth," by Zadie Smith. winner of this year's Whitbread Award,
winner of the Guardian First Book Award, and on and on.
If, as I think probable,
you are captivated by this novel, you will be glad to know that
Zadie Smith, now 24, wrote this book at the age of 21, when she
was in her senior year at Cambridge University. This suggests
that we may look forward to even more fine reading from her. (Her
second novel should be finished this year.) Rather than the typical
semi-autobiographical first novel, "White Teeth" sweeps
across cultures and continents, bringing alive the contemporary
multi-cultural London scene.
First imagine, if you
will, the penultimate days of World War II. Two members of a British
tank squad are inadvertently spared from death, which cements
an improbable friendship. Amiable, somewhat dim Archie Jones from
a down-at-the-heels section of north London, meets Samad Iqbal,
a well educated Bengali Muslim, serving in His Majesty's forces.
Twenty-five years later, when Archie, a paper-folding specialist
in a print shop, having just bollixed a suicide attempt, has begun
life anew, Iqbal, now head waiter in a neighborhood Indian restaurant,
looks him up. They recommence one of the more interesting and
humorous friendships in contemporary literature.
The author smiles benevolently
at every attempt they make at understanding one another. Archie
and Samad fix a radio together during the war, despite the awkwardness
Samad feels at "an Indian telling an Englishman what to do." From
this experience, Archie infers "the true power of do-it-yourself,
how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives,
how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with him all
his life."
Each marries. Archie
Jones is transformed thereby, "not due to any particular effort
on his part, but by means of the entirely random, adventitious
collision of one person with another." Seizing the day, he impulsively
marries nineteen-year-old Clara Bowden, "from Lambeth, via Jamaica
… beautiful in all senses except, maybe, by virtue of being black
… magnificently tall …with hair braided in a horseshoe that pointed
up when she felt lucky, down when she didn't…the most comforting
woman he had ever met. Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity."
Samad Iqbal, by contrast,
has made a traditional, arranged marriage with bossy, belligerent
Alsana from "the very best people" in Bengal. His friend Archie
is often mystified by this phenomenon. During the war, when Archie
had asked Samad what his future wife looked like. Samad confessed,
"I still have some time to wait … Unfortunately, the Begum family
do not yet have a female child of my generation." Archie, astounded:
"You mean your wife's not bloody born yet?"
A polyglot section
of north London, in which native-born Brits have become a distinct
minority, serves as backdrop for the entertaining dynamics of
immigrants settling in. In O'Connell's Pub, reopened under Bangladeshi
management, Archie and Iqbal try to understand and support one
another, with varying degrees of success. Iqbal sometimes feels
depressed by "blank pancake English faces." Once he excitedly
grabs Archie's hand, and Archie tries to remember that "Indians
were emotional weren't they … all that spicy food … "
Easygoing Jamaican
Clara Jones becomes friends with feisty, traditional Alsana Iqbal.
Clara and Archie have a daughter, Irie, Jamaican for "no problem."
Alsana, on the other hand, gives birth to twin sons named Millat
and Magid, who drive their parents crazy. One eventually develops
into a pot-smoking punk/militant Muslim. The other is sent "home"
to Bangladesh to grow up untainted by the vices of postwar Britain.
He becomes instead an atheistic attorney specializing in genetic
engineering cases, what his dad calls "more English than the English."
When the children were
young, Samad had embraced the role of active parent participant
in his children's education. Minutes of PTA meetings reveal the
sometimes jarring clash of culture. For example, debating the
value of adding playground equipment, "Mr. Iqbal wishes to know
why the Western education system privileges activity of the body
over activity of the mind and soul" and advocates "a headstand
regimen." His well-meaning efforts at responsible parent prove
futile.
Enter a third family.
Things come unglued when young Irie and delinquent Millat are
befriended by a well-meaning white couple, a liberal geneticist
and his horticulturist wife. Aiming to do good by tutoring underachieving
kids, Malcolm and Joyce Chalfen are intellectuals who view themselves
as above the common fray ("We really don't do small talk here.")
Joyce is convinced that Millat's misbehavior can only be explained
by ADHD. The author's comic voice shines through when Irie protests:
"Joyce, he hasn't got a disorder, he's just a Muslim. There are
one billion of them. They can't all have ADHD."
The woes of raising
teenagers are compounded by the disinterest of the second generation
in the values of the old. The Iqbals become convinced that their
son Millat, who drinks, smokes, and is a magnet for girls, is
himself being seduced, away from his family. They are further
outraged when Mr. Chalfen even leaps continents and invades traditional
Bangladesh. He starts writing letters to Magib, who becomes his
soul-mate: "Within two months they had filled a volume at least
as thick as Keats's and by four were fast approaching the length
and quantity of the true epistophiles, St. Paul, Clarissa, Disgruntled
from Tunbridge Wells."
Meanwhile, Mr. Chalfen
has succeeded in breeding an experimental mouse that promises
to revolutionize cancer treatment. Animal rights activists, militant
Muslims opposed to tampering with God's creation, Jehovah's Witnesses
convinced that the end is nigh, the Jones family and the Iqbals-all
converge on Chalfen's press conference to unveil his mouse. It
is controversy over this mouse that spins the novel to its inevitable
conclusion.
Zadie Smith has been
described as a combination of Dickens and Salman Rushdie, with
a little of My Beautiful Laundrette thrown in. Her wisdom
belies her years. She is a proud addition to contemporary fiction
.
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