SOURCE: Smith, Zadie, and Bob Graham. “Fame Gives Writer Lots to Chew On.” San Francisco Chronicle (13 June 2000): E1.

[In the following interview, Smith discusses the tone of White Teeth, the effects of fame, and the differences between English and American attitudes on race and class.]

Everybody starts with white teeth. They might turn yellow, fall out or get knocked out, but that's what everybody starts with, or used to. Now everybody must be starting with White Teeth. It's the international blockbuster novel by Zadie Smith.

Everybody starts with white teeth? Is that what the title means?

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Smith says.

Her seriously comic, comically serious novel is about ethnic identity in multicultural society. “White teeth” were the first words Smith, now 24, put down when she began the novel in 1997. They became the title, and she just went on from there for 448 vivid pages. Random House published it, and it is the current Chronicle Book Club selection.

“I liked the sound of it, and it stuck,” says the tall, black-leather-jacketed and black-capped Londoner, who was in San Francisco last week. “So that was that.”

She thinks the title has something to do with roots, the roots of teeth, and of identity and family. “Teeth are passed on very directly,” she says. “You can spot a family by bad teeth or good teeth.”

Offhandedly, she says a lot of English writers are slightly preoccupied with their teeth. “I,” she adds, unprompted, “have quite bad teeth.”

One of the seven major characters in her sprawling book, a beautiful Jamaican ex-Jehovah's Witness who marries a white Englishman, has no upper teeth—they were knocked out. Among the characters are identical twins who are Bangladeshi English. One stays in London and becomes a Muslim militant, the other goes to Bangladesh but comes back more English than the English.

Smith's novel may deal with serious issues, but the tone is definitely comic, which is not the same as frivolous. “It doesn't occur to me to write something that isn't comic,” she says. “I don't write in any other way.”

This doesn't mean it's laugh-out-loud funny. “It's what I would call laughter in the dark, which is also the title of a good Nabokov book.—The kind of laughter you do because if you didn't you'd cry. I like that kind of writing.”

She was surprised, during her appearance on the KQED-FM talk show “Forum” on Friday, at some of the calls when the subject of race came up. “The phone calls were so hot-tempered,” she says.

A comic view requires some detachment and distance. Smith herself is the product of cross-cultural parentage—her mother is Jamaican and her father is English—but as “an Englishman,” as she calls herself, she views things differently. “In England, if you mention race on a radio show it's like, ‘Whatever. Next topic.’ In England, people are much more comfortable with it.”

The London-born Smith understands what Americans have gone through. “Thirty years ago, there were still people riding on segregated buses in this country, so it still feels touchy. That's not true in England. It's not the same, and people aren't descended from generations of slaves. There was an incredible trauma that this country had to suffer, and it will take generations and generations to recover from.”

She considers herself, first and foremost, an artist—a novelist and not a “spokesman.” “I don't have any answers,” she says. “I think of myself as a writer, and by definition we approach things sideways. I feel very uncomfortable about speaking about anything as a representative of something.”

Smith also was clearly uncomfortable with her media tour, which had already taken her to seven cities. She mentions a famous writer who abandoned his own book tour halfway through.

She says that “if you're someone who spends a lot of time trying to think about different things each day”—that is, a writer—a book tour's whirlwind, back-to-back interviews can be a trial. “You know, people work down in coal mines, so it's ludicrous to complain about what I do,” but having to say “the same thing every day, every hour to people you've never met makes you feel like a phony, and it is the opposite of what a writer should be doing.”

Against her will, she has started to become a celebrity, which, oddly enough, is the subject of the next novel she's already started to write, The Autograph Man, about fame-obsessed autograph seekers.

“People want celebrity very much for you,” she says, but it's “a kind of Catch-22. I'm not really particularly famous, and I hope to keep it that way.”

That might be difficult with the kind of rave reviews her book has been getting. White Teeth is at the top of best-seller lists, including The Chronicle's.

“I do think that if we want writers to do what we want them to do,” she says, “we have to not treat them like pop stars.”

Her novel is about character, not polemics, but one thing it addresses is that multiculturalism, global assimilationism, is not going to go away. The Internet and the new global economy will see to that. “Absolutely,” Smith says, “but I also have great sympathy, and I hope it shows in the book, for people who don't feel this great steamroller, who are very much aligned to their religion and their state and their culture, and it's terrifying that everything else is moving along effectively without them.”

She says she doesn't know how it is in America, “but in England, class is very delicately delineated. It's not just about upper class and lower class but a myriad of things in between, and that makes for a lot of comedy. People aspire to things they are not, and people pretend to be lower class when they are not”—such as pop stars.

Smith grew up and still lives in Holborn, “at the very bottom of the hill” in North London, which can be very rich at the top, in Hampstead. She was reared by a single mother, with whom she lived until only a few weeks ago. Dot-commers and others with money are moving in, and she dreads her area becoming “a Notting Hill.”

She wrote White Teeth over a period of two years after completing her exams at Cambridge. “We have two wonderful virtues in England, a free health service and free education. I never paid a penny for any school I went to, ever. And no grants. Cambridge is free. Cambridge takes anybody who is smart enough to go.”

She has heard that it is no longer possible to get a free higher education in the United States without scholarships and loans. “What do you do here if you're poor and smart?” she inquires.