Why We Still Love White Teeth: Zadie Smith’s Audacious Debut
I don’t know why I love Zadie Smith’s White Teeth so much, the ramblings of a young twenty-something who didn’t really have the knack for putting a book together—Smith’s voice has certainly matured over the years. On Beauty, Swing Time, NW, Intimations, The Fraud, The Autograph Man, Grand Union. The Embassy of Cambodia is available at The New Yorker if you can get past the paywall.
I’m probably a bigger fan of her nonfiction: Feel Free: Essays and Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.
But how can anyone resist the opening, where Archie Jones tries to commit suicide by succumbing to the exhaust from his car parked beside a local butcher shop. Smith writes, “Whilst he slipped in and out of consciousness, the position of the planets, the music of the spheres, the flap of a tiger-moth’s diaphanous wings in Central Africa, and a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody, it had been decided that he would live.”
The owner of the butcher shop, Mo Hussein, fought a daily morning war against the local pigeons—his mantra, Smith proclaims—“The shit is not the shit; the pigeon is the shit” and while chasing the birds down with a cleaver, Mo spots Archie’s car, and thus begins the novel.
This is certainly not a feel-good beach read, although Smith’s writing is playful, filled with wit, humor, and sharp observations. The novel shifts perspectives frequently—almost as frequently as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. But where Faulker sits firmly in the U.S. South, Smith hops the globe—from Jamaican folklore to Bangladeshi traditions, fanatical Jehovah’s Witnesses, ultra-radical animal rights activists. Let’s not forget the weird genetic FutureMouse whose biological processes, including the onset of diseases and the time of its death, can be precisely controlled and predicted.
Smith integrates historical events and figures into the narrative, sometimes in very unexpected ways
The novel is really a mashup of multi-cultural post-post colonialism in a more and more globalized world all through the microcosm of 1970s London.
And, if you want to get all literary theory on White Teeth, the book’s title represents the opposite of the character Clara who loses her front teeth at the age of sixteen in an accident involving a Vespa. This loss of teeth becomes a significant aspect of her character, symbolizing the loss of her youthful beauty and, in a broader sense, the challenges and sacrifices she faces as an immigrant and as a woman navigating her identity in a new country. The missing teeth detail echoes larger themes of loss, identity, heritage, and cultural dislocation.
White Teeth is audacity writ large, something only a 21-year-could imagine or believe they could even pull off. The rumor is that Smith was not only 21, but also still at university when she was offered a six-figure book deal for only the first 80 pages of the manuscript. Any other writer would have choked under that kind of pressure. Plus, I hear she still throws some great NYC parties.
