About White Teeth

On the back cover of her novel, Zadie Smith shows no teeth. She has dark features, her eyes, her high cheekbones – arresting, really – and very red, full lips. But she shows no teeth in a photo obviously not taken in a whimsical moment. Maybe at some point I’ll discover the title’s significance, the British unrenowned for heroes of dentistry (though that might change with Irie Jones entering the profession) but for now, the dental metaphors in text and chapter titles notwithstanding, for now I’ll remain comfortably uncertain.

Much of what is in the book allows me to think of things in realms where I feel some comfort. There’s the examination of religious movements – KEVIN, Jehovah’s Witnesses – and areligious movements – Chalfenism, Archie and Clara – that allows a person to think of the encumbrances we place on the idea of faith. There’s the polyglot of characters – British, Bengali, Jamaican and Irish – that seasons the novel in so many ways – language, sound, taste, story, history – all without being self-conscious of ethnicity, or at least, as Dave Eggers might put it, without being self-aware of being self-conscious. Or maybe that doesn’t say what I’m trying to say. There’s the tread of the random intertwined with the thread of certainty, from Archie’s coin-tossing to Marcus’ FutureMouse, threads that wrap themselves around complex religious, scientific, philosophical and even historical questions, and sew them into a tapestry whose story is accessible even to a mind like mine.

And most of all, there’s the versatility of the author, a woman who writes men with insight and clarity, and adult who writes children who are compelling and complex. She seems to inhabit her characters rather than create and direct them. Before I read White Teeth, I read a story of hers in the New Yorker – the title escapes me now, but it was about a Chinese/Jewish kid driving with his father and two other boys into London to see his favorite wrestler – Tandem-X, or something like that. The father is a beautifully ambivalent character, a man with an awful relationship with his son, a relationship begat of his uncertainties or insecurities about himself. At the match, they run into a boy who is a collector, a boy dwarfed and mocked by a father ashamed that his son would sooner collect “Judaisms” than wrestling moves. In that story, Zadie wrote of multi-ethnic families who failed to communicate with one another – whether or not this failure was one caused by parents having to parent in a strange land or if the communication gap is something more universal, something that happens because parents can’t possibly inhabit the spaces of their children, remains unresolved. But those parents who try to colonize their children act only to foment the inevitable, inexorable rebellion they sow. They create the beast that will begin slouching toward home, waiting to be born.

Yes, that’s a weak effort at transition, but transition it is, between Zadie’s versatility with character and her versatility with subjects. You expect novelists to be handy with literary allusion – that a novel concerning itself with things millennial borrows slouching imagery is no surprise. But is you consider the treatment given to history (the Second World War, the Sepoy Mutiny), to science, to philosophy, to religion, you can be both in awe of the writer’s (what?! 25 years old when she wrote this!) facility with content while at the same time considering thoughts you hadn’t thunk yet.

What will have to follow is a more specific investigation into characters, a look at language, a discussion of the nature of creation and the implications of tampering, and some question about the randomness or certainty of events.