SOURCE: Moseley, Merritt. “The Modern World.” World & I 15, no. 9 (September 2000): 220.

[In the following review, Moseley assesses the depth and maturity of White Teeth, comparing Smith's sympathy for her characters and the role of her narrator to the similar traits of nineteenth-century English novelist George Eliot.]

Samad Iqbal, one of two central characters in White Teeth, Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, is a troubled man. He is troubled by his children, by his place in a multicultural Britain, by his inability to be the kind of good Muslim he wants himself (and others) to be. As he thinks to himself, “To the pure, all things are pure.” But who is pure? This question may be said to be at the heart of White Teeth. The first fact that will strike most readers is the multiracial texture of the novel. There are no pure English anymore. Samad's wife, Alsana, tells him that “you go back and back and back and it's still easier to find the correct Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe.” Purity and its challenges go deeper than race and include the sexual, the religious, and the ideological.

White Teeth is one of the most assured first novels in many years. Its author has bypassed the usual pattern for first novels—a short, self-absorbed story about a young person's development into the book's author—in favor of a much more mature and absorbing book, full of narrative interest. It is a “condition of England novel,” in a way, but the social critic never subdues the storyteller. The book centers on three families in north London. Samad, a Muslim Bengali, and his much younger wife, who comes to him through an arranged marriage, have twin sons, Magid and Millat. Samad's lifelong friend (they served together in World War II), Archie Jones, is married to Afro-Caribbean Clara Bowden; they have one daughter, Irie. Halfway through the book the second generation—Magid, Millat, and Irie—become involved with the Chalfens, Marcus and Joyce, middle-class, Jewish, and educated, and their children, particularly son Joshua.

IMMIGRANTS AND RACE

A fair consideration of Smith's achievement is difficult to arrive at. One has to negotiate the enormous interest in who and what she is to recognize what she has accomplished. Because Smith is herself a mixed-race Briton writing about immigrants and race, reviewers want to appoint her spokesperson for Britons of color. While refreshingly undoctrinaire, White Teeth includes much on the subject. One memorable passage explains that

this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. 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. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checkups. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best—less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other's lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover's bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English.

The immigrant experience as reflected by her characters is hardly idyllic, but neither is it harrowing. The most color-blind character in the novel is Archie Jones, who is also the only WASP. His best friend and mentor is Samad, his Bengali mate from the tank squadron. Archie falls in love with the teenaged Clara, a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness, and he spends much of his time (with Samad) in O'Connell's, an “Irish” pub actually owned by Abdul-Mickey, a Muslim whose resistance to assimilation consists of refusing to serve pork and displaying fragments of the Qur'an on the walls of the pub. There are occasional racist incidents, it is true; Samad has fought a white supremacist in O'Connell's, and Archie has a cross-purposes conversation with his employer, Kelvin Hero. Blustering about Archie's strange attitude and the awkwardness of dining with Clara, who is “a bit of a boogie,” Hero smoothly disinvites the Joneses from a company dinner. Fortunately, Archive is not very penetrating and takes no offense, instead congratulating himself on the food coupons Hero offers him as compensation.

Some of the English, then, are uneasy about immigration—Hero says “it's like Delhi in Euston every Monday morning”—but so are the immigrants. Samad is a proud and touchy man. Trained as an engineer in Bengal, he has to settle for a low-paid job as a waiter in London (as his son contemptuously says, he is a “curry-shifter”). His own apostasy from the Islam he wants to value torments him. Guilt caused by his overmastering attraction to his sons' pretty red-haired music teacher causes him to send one of them, Magid, back to Bangladesh to be reared as a devout Muslim and potential imam. His gesture for purity works no better than many others in this story; Magid becomes a Western, scientistic infidel, while the twin who stays home, Millat, joins a squad of Islamic militant youths who burn The Satanic Verses and practice cultural intimidation.

The counterpart of white racism is white fascination with the Other. This stance is embodied in Joyce Chalfen, whose protectiveness toward Millat and, later, Magid—whether motivated by liberal guilt or the sexual attraction the smoldering Millat exercises effortlessly over females—shades over from taking an interest in a schoolmate of her children to housing him, making excuses for him, and even neglecting her own family for him.

PATERNITY, PATRIMONY, AND PATRIOTISM

Questions of paternity, patrimony, and patriotism occupy much of Smith's novel. Samad is proud of—almost everyone else, including his family, would say obsessed with—his great-grandfather Mangal Pande, who, he claims, rebelled against the British and is thus “the founder of modern India.” Like many of the other “facts” of late-twentieth-century life, this appears questionable on grounds of both historical accuracy and relevance. If Samad is unable to know his ancestor reliably, he has the same problem with his children and they with him. And this pattern is repeated in the next generation, as Irie, when the novel draws to a close, is expecting a child. Neither she nor the reader knows who the father is, but another racial permutation will clearly be introduced into Willesden Green. Life is already complicated enough there. Samad cries to a more comfortably assimilated Indian, “I don't wish to be a modern man! I wish to live as I was always meant to! I wish to return to the East! … Willesden Green! Visiting cards in sweetshop windows, Judy Blume in the school, condom on the pavement, Harvest Festival, teacher-temptress!”

Smith echoes the theme of fatherhood and heritage in the scientific realm. Marcus Chalfen is an experimental biologist who is working on—manufacturing, really—a genetically modified FutureMouse, which will be interesting, useful to researchers, but doomed to die of diseases programmed into its genes. All the novel's significant characters, acting for their own reasons, oppose Chalfen. There are Jehovah's Witnesses who object to man playing God, Islamic militants who agree that he is questioning the rightness of God's creation, and animal rights sympathizers; there is his son, who resents him for more traditional family reasons, and various Joneses and Iqbals, who also have mixed motives. From across London they come to the grand revelation of the supermouse. This climactic scene, which is set on the last night of the millennium and links up with Archie's and Samad's war experiences, is overdetermined and melodramatic and the only real false note in White Teeth. Still, it weaves together Smith's themes in a meaningful way.

I seem to have been writing about this book as if it were primarily of sociological or philosophical interest, its author a sage rather than an artist. It is a novel of ideas, and Smith is unafraid of authoritative commentary. But it is as a novelist that she shines. There is a large and complex plot here, tracing two or three generations of three families, covering 50 years of modern Western life and 150 years of Eastern history. It is held together by narrative urgency and several repeated motifs, including not only patrimony but, more daringly and successfully, teeth.

SMITH'S VIVID CHARACTERS

The author creates many vivid characters. She writes in all sorts of voices, hilariously sometimes. Her aging Jamaican Jehovah's Witness (“Some people … have done such a hol' heap of sinning, it late for dem to be making eyes at Jehovah. It take effort to be close to Jehovah. It take devotion and dedication. … Isn't dat right, Darcus?”) is as pungent and true as her account of the young Millat, speaking with the Jamaican accent that all the kids, whatever their nationality, employ to express scorn:

“I tax dat,” he said, pointing out an admittedly impressive small, shiny, red MG about to turn the corner. “And dat!” he cried, getting there just before Magid as a BMW whizzed past. “Man, you know I tax that,” he said to Magid, who offered no dispute. “Blatantly.”

Her world is full of men and women who, if only briefly, flare into vivid existence. The waiters in Samad's restaurant; two elderly black men perpetually grumbling and playing cards in O'Connell's; Mo Hussein-Ishmael, the butcher who saves Archie's life because when he tries to kill himself with the exhaust of his car he parks it in Mo's loading zone; the Indian boys who join Millat in the unfortunately named KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation); and Alsana's overly assimilated relative Neena, or Niece of Shame: All are alive in these pages.

A number of reviewers have linked Smith with Salman Rushdie, who gave her novel a strong recommendation. But, for all that both are ambitious novelists who write densely about matters including the life of immigrants in twentieth-century Britain, it is hard to see where the resemblance lies. Smith's powerful and personal style is not that of Rushdie, which is baroque and self-indulgent. The novelist she reminds me of most is George Eliot, in at least two powerful ways.

One is Smith's sympathy for the people she writes about. Eliot wrote to enlarge her reader's sympathies, and, whether Smith set out on the same mission, her novel has that effect. Though White Teeth is not a satire, there are satirical parts, invariably moved by a humane and liberal acceptance of the characters. Every one of them has some ridiculous trait; each has some dignity or aspiration, some essential human worthwhileness. They all have something interesting (and sometimes right) to say, even when they disagree. Millat and Magid become almost opposite figures, but we are forbidden to conclude that one is finally right and the other wrong. Alsana, for much of the novel a perplexed, not terribly smart woman nagging her husband, speaks up against intolerance when her son and his friends are burning The Satanic Verses (which none has read). She burns all of Millat's “secular stuff”—including his sneakers, his rap music, all the paraphernalia of his “Raggastani” lifestyle—on a pyre in her garden.

“Everyone has to be taught a lesson,” Alsana had said, lighting the match with heavy heart some hours earlier. “Either everything is sacred or nothing is. And if he starts burning other people's things, then he loses something sacred also. Everyone gets what's coming, sooner or later.”

It is striking that in the large cast of characters, Smith resists giving Irie, a promising and sensitive student who, like her, is half Jamaican and half English, any particularly special role. She alone seems to register that her family, or the Iqbals—the scene, every day, of a “huge battle between who they are and who they should be, what they were and what they will be”—is more stressful than other people's.

CONFIDENT AND MAGISTERIAL NARRATION

The other Eliotic trait is the role of the narrator, which is confident and magisterial. The narrator holds together the multifarious narrative and its ideas. And the narrator comments, with zest and wit and, most of all, wisdom (this is what makes the novel seem preternaturally accomplished for a 24-year-old author), about the events and themes of her work.

If religion is the opiate of the people [she tells her readers], tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made. To Samad, as to the people of Thailand, tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles. That didn't mean he could live by them, abide by them, or grow in the manner they demanded, but roots were roots and roots were good. You would get nowhere telling him that weeds too have tubers, or that the first sign of loose teeth is something rotten, something degenerate, deep within the gums.

A more audacious reflection begins, “It's a funny thing about the modern world.” The funny thing is the expectation (attributed here to “girls in the toilets of clubs”) that people ought to love them.

Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Not only is the assurance, the solidity, of this reflection unusual in a fictional landscape of postmodern jouissance and infinite ironic remove, but the idea it expresses is very much at odds with the presuppositions of the ordinary young person's novel. Bridget Jones and her friends—and the other characters in dozens of derivative accounts of “singletons” in London—meet for emergency, alcohol-assisted deliberations about men and their culpable refusal to love when and where and whom they should. Smith can be just as funny about young love but has it sized up better.

To call Smith a moralist may make her sound dreary, and she is not: She is hip. But the characters in White Teeth come to know what Samad tells Archie on the battlefield in 1945: “You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence … My great-grandfather knew it. Someday our children will know it.” The plot reveals in unpredictable ways the consequences of actions the two of them take long before they can even believe they will have children.

Samad can be infuriating to Archie, whom he bullies for fifty years, his family, and sometimes the reader. But he is capable of wisdom, too. As he tells Archie,

“If you ever hear anyone, when you are back home—if you, or we, get back to our respective homes—if ever you hear anyone speak of the East,” and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, “hold your judgment. If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.”

The same observation applies to late-twentieth-century Britain, as Zadie Smith knows and shows in this rich text, this brilliant panorama. White Teeth is at the same time full and sad and “a funny thing about the modern world.”