The White Teeth-Based Second Installment: Randomness and Causality

So let’s first tackle the idea of randomness, of chance, and try to discern something about the way our lives unfold, hopefully without the risk of being treated like Blake’s Little Boy Lost. As I see my own life, all events have flowed from one seminal moment, the night of April 25/26, 1977. It is typical of me to say that, without my father’s death, none of the good things I have would I have. And it’s true. The series of events necessary for the convergence of my path with Kathy’s is amazing, by which I mean capable of inducing slack-jawed wonder.

The most obvious circumstance that needed to be satisfied was location. My father’s untimely death canceled our move to Florida – the McAteer boys were to go house-hunting in June, and the family would follow before the end of summer; sadly, there never was a bonding of the three such as that promised by the aforesaid trip. And so the setting for my story remained White Plains.

The death of a father necessitates the emergence of a father figure. Vinny Longo was an obvious choice. A less obvious choice was Tom Eaton, who ran the White Plains Rec basketball camp and taught at the junior high school. Tom emerges as a major character not because we’re listing father figures but because his character reference, unofficially solicited in Pat’s Pub in 1992, would play an important role in Ms. Markey’s decision to defer to date this narrator.

Tom knew Kathy because the Markey and Eaton families at one point lived in the Ridge, a somewhat isolated neighborhood of White Plains, isolated because a trip to downtown would often necessitate a drive on the highway, or at least that’s why I saw the Ridge as far away from my home in the Highlands. When the White Plains Public Schools reorganized in 1979, Tom Eaton graduated with the eighth grade class. The nurse at the high school was one Toby Markey. Yes, of that Markey family.

Now what happened between sixth grade and ninth grade to the narrator cannot be illustrated by connecting of dates to one another. The short version is this: come junior high, the elementary schools merge. Kids in other elementary schools are smarter and work harder than Mike. Mike no longer sees himself as the smartest kid, so he starts to slack off. His excuse: “They’re not smarter than me; they just work harder,” as if that excuse does anyone, least of all the excusor, any good. So what we get at the high school is a Mike who thinks himself too good for mandatory study halls but not good enough for a lot of other things (sports, honors classes). This Mike, however, is kind of charming and ingratiates himself with the school nurses – you know who one of them is – and is thus free to fritter away study hall time (used to do homework by those who allow themselves to take on academic challenges) by hanging around the nurses’ office, where he also skips the odd class or two. It is the recommendation of that nurse in 1992 that clinches the acceptance of the proferred date – dinner and drinks – by the nurse’s daughter and ultimately leads to the set of circumstances that bring Emma to our attention. Of course, for her to be born, the process wasn’t so neat as submit your resume and two references and we’ll consider your application. No, many stars, all of which will go undiscussed here, had to be lined up, not all of them happily, to bring our protagonist to the proper temperament, the proper experience and the proper barroom to get this family off the ground.

If you wanted me to, I could spend time pointing out the milestones that brought me to that place – Patrick’s Pub – at that time – the night before Thanksgiving, 1992 – when I first offered my company to my wife. But I couldn’t explain how she got there. Nor can I, since my thesis is that all good things for me flow from that tragic spring night in 1977, demonstrate that the night is responsible for the events that followed. To link these events causally would seem to imply that my father’s death happened only to me, that God constructed the universe so that I and I alone would reach some sort of destiny, so some other bride would go unwed, some other child go unborn.

So it’s this sense of randomness disguised in hindsight as causality that led me to anticipate with such interest the future that would be borne of Samad’s morphine-induced self-aggrandizement and Archie’s lazy suggestability. Zadie Smith never for a moment lead you to believe that Archie had executed the execution of Dr. Sick. To then see Millat’s hash-induced defiance of Plan B step into the execution phase at the same moment Archie and Samad from their different locations in the same room recognize Dr. Perret – indeed, to see all the characters’ destinies converge on that one moment, which was ultimately only one moment of all the moments of their fictional lives – that was the work of an artist, of a master who filled a canvas with such compelling details that you never noticed that all along your eyes were being drawn to this one point. It is a work that at once elevates me – I have been chosen to choose a book of such beauty in structure and character, and an author is capable of inspiring in me such appreciation as I’ve reserved for Yeats’ “I balanced all, brought all to mind/the years ahead seemed waste of breath,/a waste of breath the years behind/in balance with this life, this death” – and disheartens me because it reminds me of what that Yeats’ quotation told me three or four years ago: you can’t do this. Such is not my place in the weft of the universe – I love that phrase – but such is Zadie Smith’s, ‘cause there is certainly no randomness to the structure of her story.

So, with regard to the randomness debate in the noel, the manipulated DNA of FutureMouse, I know where I stand. I’m just less sure of how I got there.