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181 of 202 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Monstropolous Ingenuity!, April 25, 2000
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 tome 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.
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89 of 102 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Modern Comic Masterpiece, June 1, 2000
By A Customer
Zadie Smith's remarkable first novel, White Teeth, deserves all the praise and attention it's gotten since its publication earlier this year. This big, rich multicultural cacophony of a novel is a modern comic masterpiece that brilliantly captures the mixture and conflict of races, ethnicities, cultures, and beliefs in London at the millenium. Moreover, unlike other British writers who sometimes seem condescending and unabashedly full of themselves (Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie immediately come to mind), Zadie Smith's writing is full of good humor and prescient insight into the value of even the most disparate life experiences. Smith anchors her story around the unlikely friendship of an easy-going, seemingly unflappable working-class Englishman, Archibald Jones, and a deep-thinking, serious Bengali Muslim waiter, Samad Iqbal. The two first meet inside a tank in the waning days of World War II. They then reunite thirty years later in North London, two unsuccessful middle aged men living out their lives in O'Connell's Poolroom, "an Irish poolroom run by Arabs with no pool tables." But while the stories of Archie and Samad anchor the narrative, their relationship is only a small part of this hilarious and deeply insightful novel. Zadie Smith, in reviewing her own novel in the British publication Butterfly, described White Teeth as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing ten-year-old." The amazing thing is that her description is accurate, for we get not merely the story of the unlikely pair of Archie and Samad, but also many other amusing and intersecting stories, all of them driven by the clash of culture, belief, race, traditon, lineage, and science which forms the turmoil which marks London, and all of the Western world's major cities, at the millenium. We get the story of Archie's young Jamaican wife, Clara, and of Clara's mother, Hortense, a devout and rapturous Jehovah's Witness. We get the story of Samad's turbulent relationship with his wife, Alsana, as well as Samad's struggle to raise his two twin sons, Millat and Magid, in the face of a materialist culture that pervades and undermines traditionalism of all kinds. We get the story of Marcus and Joyce Chalfen, one a geneticist and the other a pop horticulturist, and their son, Josh. The Chalfens are unstintingly secular, scientific and self-centered celebrants of their own ideology of "Chalfenism". Finally, we get the story of Irie, the awkward daughter of Archie and Clara, who winds through the novel, its characters and situations, searching for an identity in the tangled history of her Jamaican past and the crowded cultural stew of her North London present. In Smith's words, capturing the essence of her novel in a couple of sentences: "It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course." Believe everything you've read and heard about this novel because it's true: this is the best first novel to be published in a long time!
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57 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Please don't believe the hype!, February 16, 2001
By A Customer
Don't believe the hypeI'm still trying to work out why all the critics gushed over this novel. All I can think is that they actually think this book is an honest, sincere glimpse into the life of Blacks and Asians in London. I think that is what's so frustrating about this book. Nothing rings true. If this book does open a floodgate of imitators (which I'm quite sure it will) I hope someone else with a bit more talent can improve on this. The worse thing would be that anyone got the impression that this is what London life is really like for us. I finished this book not caring about ANY of the characters, which is surely not a good sign. Not Archie, not Samad, not Clara or Alsana, not Millat/Magid /the Chalfens and definitely not Irie - who I'm sure was supposed to hold this whole story together. There's not one sympathetic character within the pages. By the end of the book, you're left wondering why you wasted so much time (and it is a long book) reading about such a pathetic bunch of people. Most of the critics seem to be in awe of what they consider as the author's confident, assured and mature style of writing (especially considering her young age, it's her first novel etc.). However, I think the tone of this novel is one of pure indulgence and arrogance. It appears that a thesaurus was used the whole way through the novel, (for every simple expression, the most elaborate word is substituted in its place, which meant the story was made unnecessarily laborious to follow. The author also used half facts, and down right untruths about certain things pivotal to the story (i.e. the Jehovah's Witnesses religion, multicultural London life) to blatantly patronise and mislead the reader. I am not a Jehovah's Witness, but I know for a fact, that Clara would not have been sent to a Catholic school, none of their members would wear a cross, they don't quote from the King James version of the bible and they don't sing secular hymns and they are not your stereotypical Pentecostal churchgoers, in fact a Witness wouldn't use the word church, the rank and file Witness does not have any influence on what is printed in their magazines (unlike Ryan Topps) and they would never - I repeat NEVER organise a protest for ANY reason. These are all things that could have found out quite easily. The fact that it wasn't shows contempt for the reader as far as I'm concerned. The Witnesses are an easy target, but singling them out for what amounts to amateur attempt of humour is quite spineless. I 'm not an expert on the Muslim religion, but certainly this story isn't exactly a good advertisement for it either (but then it WAS recommended by Salmun Rushdie - perhaps that should have been a clue). There was no real thread running through the story - it starts off following Archie, then skips to Clara, leaves Clara halfway through her story, jumps to Samad then to their children - but instead of fleshing out their characters, they're just left as empty shells, while the past history of characters who don't really have a lot of bearing on the story are delved into in far too much detail. Clara, who should have been a strong central character, seems to disappear from the whole story. Irie, who is a central character, ends up becoming spoil and vindictive. Samad and Alsana are just Asian caricatures, no depth, just the regular stereotypes. No one seemed to have any redeeming features.. There were a few times where I thought the story showed a bit of humour - the black hairdressers, the false teeth - even Joyce Chalfen (although she also seems to disappear half way through the story) but nothing about this novel was new or fresh. I hope no one read this thinking they were getting some sort of insight into how Black/Asian Londoners live - it doesn't even come close. And what was that ending about? None of the ends are tied up. It all comes across as if the author is trying just that bit too hard to be clever. Perhaps the author really does need to mature. In my opinion, this book is a wasted opportunity to put the real story of multicultural London out there.
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