Wood pooh-poohed this text, inaptly, as it turns out, as hysterical realism. Am not sure if Wood was interested in the bad gender politics of that particular generic designation, but the gross amalgamation of this text with Pynchon, Rushdie, Delillo, DFW does not make much sense. (It’s most similar to Delillo, I think, of the usual suspects listed therein.) Master figure is of course the odontic, which is most plainly significant to the extent that a character might be “from somewhere. She has roots” (23). Most of the major characters are subject to ‘root canals’ during the story, wherein their own genetic/ontic (as opposed to dental/odontic) roots are traced out. The ‘roots’ are typically nationality (Jamaica, Bangladesh, England are the most important) and religion (Jehovah’s Witness, Islam, Judaism). As it happens, teeth gnash. They are destroyed through the nocturnal bruxism. Root canals are necessary because the teeth are dicked up. Needless to say, the British empire dicked everything up—though the point of the text is equally that the Empire caused the gnashing, which is also a commingling, a bringing together. This in itself can’t be all bad—after all, the couples here are multinational: English prat marries Jamaican beauty, for instance. Hard to argue against miscegenated childrens, in my not all humble opinion. The novel’s great friendship is English prat and traditional Moslem (“very religious, lacking nothing except the faith” (53)), who are brought together in fighting fascism (a great story there (71-102)). There’s other gnashings: generational discord, religious tactics (fundamentalist vel non), gender politics. On that last, we have a bizarre little bit (that earned a gross! in my marginalia): But to be serious for a moment: as you know, I am a man whose profession it is to look deep inside of “Woman,” and, like a psychiatrist, mark her with a full bill of health or otherwise. And I feel sure, my friend (to extend a metaphor), that you have explored your lady-wife-to-be in such a manner, both spiritually and mentally, and found her not lacking in any particular. (43-44)The speaker here is not a dentist, as one might otherwise expect from the thematic, but is rather a gynecologist. Does the thematic still work? Is drilling down into the tooth during a root canal similar to psychiatry? Is it like looking deep inside a woman’s cavernous birthing canal? Can one go spelunking in the vagina for spiritual/mental thingies? Did I fuck up all my marriages by not looking for those thingies while exploring? Traditional Moslem wife has a rejoinder to all that, however: I was married to Samad Iqbal the same evening of the very day I met him. Yes, I didn’t know him from Adam. But I liked him well enough. We met in the breakfast room on a steaming Delhi day and he fanned me with The Times. I thought he had a good face, a sweet voice, and his backside was high and well formed for man of his age. Very good. Now, every time I learn something more about him, I like him less. (66)Husband’s traditionalism is well understood as resisting all that is solid melting into air: “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!” (121). (Rejoinder: who “can pull the West out of ‘em once it’s in?” (id.)) The issue here is that “the sins of the Eastern father shall be visited upon the Western sons” (135), which is a primary component of the narrative here; “immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition” (id.), first as tragedy, second as farce, I suppose. The reiteration initiates not with original sin, but with “original trauma” (136)—“they can’t help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale , freckled arms of an imperial sovereign” (id.). Our traditionalist objects that “people call it assimilation when it is nothing but corruption” (159). (“it is still hard to admit,” however, “that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English” (272).)The obligatory Hegelian commentary: “We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with my legs crossed, letting things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight the holy war” (150). The obligatory Baudrillardian commentary: “A few found themselves seventeen years later at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, dressed up as Jamaicans in the Jamaica exhibit,, acting out a horrible simulacrum of their previous existence—tine drums, coral necklaces—for they were English now, more English than the English by virtue of their disappointments” (255). The traditionalist would seek to control the offspring, who may not want to be traditionalists, loyal to mother country—but rather might want to become, say, fundamentalists, or secular progressives, or socialists, or loyal imperialists, or whatever. Dude laments that his kids “strayed so far from the life I had intended for them” (336). No dead hand control, yo. It is an important text for multinational households (as is my household). There is a balance to be drawn between assimilation and ‘roots.’ I for one am annoyed by pure tradition, but am a proponent of history. Perhaps the former tells me what I should be, whereas the latter tells me what I am; the former, an idealism, recommends fascism, but not so much the latter, which is a bit more historical materialist. That said, our traditionalist contends that “tradition was culture, and culture led to roots, and these were good, these were untainted principles” (161). Dude doesn't like that assimilation to the empire leads to “your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere” (336), but that strikes me as basic to the postmodern condition at the imperial center and therefore par for the course, a progressive development overall. (What kind of weird sense of proto-fascist entitlement must one possess if one can demand belonging somewhere? Is it not an odd, dangerous demand? Traditionalists want to “live on solid ground, underneath safe skies” (176), which invokes basic fascist ideology: cf. Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism.)Anyway, plenty of other interesting things; it is a pregnant writing. Some Marxist content in characters of liberated niece of traditional Moslems as well as in scientist-socialist Jewish couple. (Also, omniscient narrator’s voice: “If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears more sinister” (161).) Tradition infects the kids, who are led to believe that they “stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willsden” (183). Kids are “two of Zeno’s headfuck arrows” (384), wherein Zeno’s objective is to “establish multiplicity, the Many, as an illusion” and then “prove reality a seamless, flowing whole” (id.), basically parmenidean aletheia and Anaximander’s apeiron. Narrative in second half turns toward scientist-socialists who work on genetic projects: “’You eliminate the random, you rule the world,’ said Marcus simply. ‘Why stick to octogenes? One could program every step in the development of an organism: reproduction, food habits, life expectancy’” (283). This program generates quite a bit of resistance by the conclusion, wrapped up with “the patenting of living organisms” (395), which I initially misread as the “parenting of living organisms”—and of course the genetic engineering of a perfectly controlled organism by scientist is exactly what all of the fuss has been with traditionalist’s failure in canalizing his sons into traditionalism. The commentary is plain, but not tendentious. The parallelism between the parenting and patenting plots is overall very well done.That said, genetically engineered creature is also a nifty little thing from anglo-american philosophy, Quine’s ‘gavagai’—which might be a rabbit, as ostensibly identified by the illiterate tribespersons, but also, conceivably, might be a collection of undetached rabbit parts, or one of many rabbit temporal phases, depending on how tribesperson conceives the signified internally to go with the signifier that we translate facilely as mere ‘rabbit.’ Here, the parallel is substantial: Because, if it can be argued that the animal under experimentation is owned by any group of people, i.e., it is not a cat but effectively an invention with catlike qualities, then that very cleverly and very dangerously short-circuits the work of animal rights groups and leads to a pretty fucking scary vision of the future.(395) Thereafter, “surely the mouse in this case is a symbol” (401). I fell in love with author, however, when she described how this (somewhat ‘extremist’) animal rights group began as student radicals, idealist, passionate, “but political infighting, back-stabbing, and endless factionalizing soon disillusioned them as far as the fate of Homo erectus was concerned” (396), and the charismatic qualities of the leaders attracted “political drifters” (id.). This is of course alleging that this type of misanthropic animal rights activism is the progressive wing of lumpenized antisocial nihilism. Author has good comedic timing (e.g., fundamentalist book-burner who advises “you don’t have to read shit to know that it’s blasphemous” (194), or the great bit that reveals how the fundamentalist is always already structured by its antithesis, channeling Goodfellas: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Muslim” (369)). She also possesses a committed perspective, an enviable cosmopolitanism, and is about as charming as can be.Recommended for readers who are independent, even of gravity, persons whose bodies are keeping dark secrets from them, and those who, simply put, fuck their sisters.
One star? Of course this is not a one-star wretched ignominous failure, this is a mighty Dickensian epic about modern Britain. But not for me. It's a question of tone. I have now tried to read this one twice and each time I find I'm groaning quietly and grinding my teeth. Zadie Smith's omniscient narrator, alas for me, has an air of horrible smirkiness, like a friend who just can't help pointing out all the less than pleasant attributes of everyone else, all in the name of life-affirming humour, allegedly, but gradually wearing you down. Didn't anyone get sick of this apart from me? I hear this kind of humour in current British comedy all the time. When it's cranked up to the max and runs at 200 miles an hour, it's great, as in the recent political satire movie In the Loop (recommended) but when it's on a low leisurely level, as in a big sprawling novel, it just gets on my wick. It might be a symptom of the cultural cringe I discuss a propos The Age of Elegance - British writers can no longer take their country and culture that seriously, they feel somehow that it's just not very cool and so their default attitude is self-deprecation. You don't get this in big novels about modern America - "American Pastoral", "We Were the Mulvaneys" and "The Corrections" and "Freedom" spring to mind. Franzen, for instance, uses humour all the time and excoriates large areas of American society, but there's no perpetual undermining of his own characters for the sake of inexpensive laughs. My head says I should like White Teeth but my heart says Zadie Smith was a literary ad-man's dream come true. For a good, funny book about multicultural Britain, see "The Buddha of Suburbia" by Hanif Kureishi. For a great review of White Teeth which eloquently puts the case against, whilst trying not to, see Ben's review herehttp://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....
—Paul Bryant
Rooster wrote: "I found this book to be forgettable too. I gave it up about half way."I saw some of the tv series recently. It was just as boring as the book and I didn't watch it all.
—Petra X
White Teeth is an expansive, detailed, and beautifully written attempt to encapsulate the social chaos that blossoms at the bridging of generational, national and sexual mindsets. It reminds me very much of the freeflowing histories written by Marquez and Allende, as well as Salman Rushdie's strange little one-off treatise on cultural alienation, Fury. (Samad, in particular, reminds me quite a bit of Fury's Malik Solanka.)The book does many things well. Smith has a serious ear for dialogue and accent, she knows how to manage the flow and pacing of a story, and she's quite skilled at employing large concepts (genetic manipulation, immigrant psychology, the concept of history itself) both as fact and as metaphor. Her cast of characters is varied and nearly every one of them comes off as a fully flesh and blood human being. However, it's in terms of these personalities that I feel she makes her biggest misstep.Zadie Smith is what I'd call an Ironist. I don't mean this in the Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Jon Stewart sense. I don't mean that she's a comedian. I mean it in the sense that the territory she stands on--that her narrator in White Teeth stands on--is one whose boundaries are staked out in terms of what she is not. My friend Brandon commented below that Smith shows "blatant contempt for every character except the one who is clearly based on the author." While I understand where he's coming from, I don't think it's contempt per se. On the contrary, I think Smith has deep feelings for most of her characters--even the more despicable ones like Crispin and Millat. I think that what Brandon interprets as contempt is something far more ambiguous: let's call it detached superiority.The Ironist defines herself through the process of over-defining others. Every character in this novel is over-defined, over-drawn. While this provides us with a great, at times excruciating level of detail, it also paints each of them into a kind of cage wherein all of their actions are predictable. Each of them has a sort of "final vocabulary" (cf. Rorty) that defines the limits of what they might do or say--the doctrines of Islam and the Watchtower Society, of PETA or clinical science. In the worst cases, their adherence to these vocabularies allows Smith to slip them into easy "types" (see: Mr. Topps, Crispin, Joshua, Marcus, the various members of FATE). Smith creates her authorial/narrative identity--what's called a metastable personality--by passively proving that she is not limited by such a final vocabulary, and that in escaping their confines she has a broader, more comprehensive view of the social workings of the world. This is, generally speaking, the goal of any omniscient narrator, but the way that Smith goes about writing this one in particular imparts a certain sense of smugness (the parenthetical asides to the reader, the knowing winks, the jokes at the expense of easy targets) that isn't always present.The metastable personality is the natural reaction to uncomfortability with final vocabularies, but it itself is of course just as self-defining as any of them (albeit in the opposite direction). It instinctually yearns for instability, but prefers to admire chaos from afar rather than living in it. The metastable personality knows that in order to maintain coherence it must remain stable, and that the only way to remain stable is to balance itself on the disbelief of all known final vocabularies. Smith writes off worldview after worldview, but is of course unable to articulate her own because her own is simply the absence of adherence to any such worldview.This isn't so much a criticism of Smith's work as it is an explanation of why it is the way it is, and why it can be read as contempt.
—Ben
