White Teeth book club questions

1. 1.

   Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh to be raised Muslim and give him 'roots.' The result is the opposite of what he intended. Does the novel suggest that you can engineer your children's identity? What's the argument?

2. 2.

   The Chalfens believe they are helping Irie and Millat. Are they? What is Smith saying about a certain kind of liberal do-gooderism that presents itself as rescue?

3. 3.

   White Teeth was published in 2000 and is set against the backdrop of British multiculturalism in the 1970s–1990s. Reading it now, does the novel feel prescient, dated, or both? Which of its predictions about British society seem to have come true?

4. 4.

   Archie is perhaps the least racially or culturally marked character in the novel — he is a kind of blank white Englishman. Is that a choice Smith is making about a certain kind of Englishness? What does Archie represent?

5. 5.

   Samad is often described as the novel's most fully inhabited character. What makes him work as a character in a way that some of the other figures don't quite match?

6. 6.

   The novel ends with a lot of plot resolution compressed into a chaotic climax. Did the ending work for you, or did the satirical broadness feel like it undercut the emotional investment of the earlier sections?

7. 7.

   History in the novel refuses to stay in the past — the 1857 mutiny keeps surfacing in Samad's consciousness, Archie's wartime moment returns, the twins can't escape their origins. Is this a realistic psychological claim or is Smith using it as a structural device?

8. 8.

   Compare Irie's experience as a second-generation immigrant to the experience of Millat's. What does the novel suggest about the different ways men and women negotiate between cultures?

9. 9.

   White Teeth is often placed in conversation with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. If you've read both, what does Smith do with similar themes that Rushdie doesn't, and vice versa?

10. 10.

    Smith has said she is sometimes embarrassed by the novel's youthful exuberance. Does reading it now, more than two decades later, make you see the seams more or less? Is there something the youthfulness gets right that more controlled fiction misses?

11. 11.

    The novel's comedy is often its best feature and also a source of frustration — it keeps diffusing emotional tension. Is that a flaw or a feature? What would White Teeth be without the jokes?

12. 12.

    By the end, does anyone in the novel manage to escape their history? Does the novel think escape is possible, or is the point that it isn't?

How to run the discussion

• Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
• Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
• Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
• Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.