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What it argues
White Teeth begins with two men — Archie Jones, a Englishman of no particular distinction, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi immigrant and his oldest friend — who met during the last days of the Second World War. The novel then spreads across their families, their children, and their overlapping social worlds in North London over the following decades, arriving at a climax set in 1999 at a biotech company's product launch. It is, among other things, a novel about what it means to be British when you are not from Britain, what it means to be Muslim in secular society, what it means to escape history when history keeps following you.
Smith published White Teeth when she was twenty-four, and the novel has the energy of someone writing faster than they can contain. It is genuinely funny, often brilliantly so — the social comedy of the Iqbal family, of Archie's second wife's Jehovah's Witness family, of the twins Magid and Millat taking almost perfectly opposite paths from the same starting point. The humor is not gentle: Smith is satirizing the comfortable liberal assumptions of multicultural London with real sharpness, and the comedy is the vehicle for something more serious.
What it gets right
- 1.
The half-life of history is the novel's central argument: trauma and origin don't fade away, they resurface in the next generation and the one after that, often in transformed and unrecognizable forms.
- 2.
Samad's decision to send one twin back to Bangladesh to be raised Muslim and keep one in London produces the novel's central irony: the twin meant to preserve tradition becomes secular and Westernized; the twin kept in London becomes a radical Islamist.
- 3.
Smith's multicultural London is not a utopia — it is a site of constant negotiation, misunderstanding, and comedy, and the novel refuses to endorse the comfortable version of 'we're all really the same.'
What it covers
Who wrote it
Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in North London to a Jamaican mother and English father. White Teeth (2000), her debut novel written while she was a student at Cambridge, was published when she was twenty-four to enormous critical and commercial success. She has since published four more novels — The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), NW (2012), and The Fraud (2023) — as well as two acclaimed essay collections, Changing My Mind (2009) and Feel Free (2018). She is a professor of creative writing at New York University and is widely regarded as one of the most important British novelists of her generation.
