Review: ‘White Teeth,’ by Zadie Smith (Published 2021) (2024)

WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith | Review first published April 30, 2000

Zadie Smith’s debut novel is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones and textures. Hopscotching through several continents and 150 years of history, “White Teeth” encompasses a teeming family saga, a sly inquiry into race and identity and a tenderhearted satire on religious antagonism and cultural bemusem*nt. One might be inclined to assume that Smith, who began writing the book when still a Cambridge undergraduate, has bitten off more than she can chew; one might even feel a little huffy that one so young (she is 24) has aimed so high. Is it open season on Henry James’s baggy monster? Yet aside from a rather wobbly final quarter, Smith holds it all together with a raucous energy and confidence that couldn’t be a fluke.

“White Teeth” begins as the story of an Englishman, Archie Jones, and his accidental friendship with Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh. The two men met in 1945 when they were part of a tank crew inching through Europe in the final days of World War II. They missed out on the action, and over the next three decades have continued to do much the same. Archie is something of a sad sack, a dull but decent fellow who tied for 13th in a bicycle race in the 1948 Olympic Games; he has failed at many things, including marriage (he got the Hoover in the divorce settlement) and a suicide attempt that begins the novel. Samad, in spite of looking like Omar Sharif, is now a downtrodden waiter in a West End curry house, and is obsessed by the history of his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, who allegedly fired the first shot of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 (and missed).

This conflation of the high and the low — biblical morality juxtaposed with the mundane details of domesticity — is key to Smith’s frisky and irreverent comic attack. At one point Samad is doubtful about disclosing a secret to his friend Zinat, who protests her trustworthiness: “Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me.” But the passage goes on to point out: “Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.” Here it’s the ancient solemnity of an oath bumping up against modern technology that strikes off comic sparks.

This juxtaposition is related to the larger way in which the novel plays with the gap between expectation and reality, most vigorously dramatized in Samad’s offspring, the “first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment.” Samad demands too much of his twin sons, Magid and Millat, and pays a calamitous price. He packs Magid back home to be educated, but the son returns eight years later with a pukka English accent and a serene atheism. As for Millat, he begins as a superstud and troublemaker, graduates to mobster machismo — his touchstones are “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas” — before pledging himself to the militant fundamentalist Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN (they’re aware they have “an acronym problem”), and demonstrating against Salman Rushdie in 1989.