White Teeth by Zadie SmithMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I'll be honest - I didn't fully get what was going on in this book for a while, even though it did make me laugh out loud more times than I could count because of the seemingly random but well placed spread of comically absurd lines that caught me off guard. The writing here is pretty clever, enough so that regardless of your level of understanding, it is possible to appreciate the little moments throughout this book. It's really not that difficult to read by any means.
In retrospect, the story is actually a pretty well thought-out impression of the immigrant family experience in Britain across generations (and conflicts as a result); I think I was just more thrown off by the haphazard nature of the plot itself, filled with inexplicable moments and situations that made it difficult for me to connect it to any real issue at hand. It felt almost like the magical realism of Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude where events just happen due to supernatural causes and are taken for granted... except there was no real magic here other than fate. If anything though, it's about how people deal with the circumstances given them, no matter how peculiar they are.
That said, there was one thing that started to bother me the more I noticed it. Other reviews for this book explain it better, but to put it simply, there's a certain tone of superiority that the narrator speaks with regard to the behavior of the book's characters, through the use of backhanded comments and witty asides. This "smugness" is partly responsible for the funny moments I mentioned earlier, but at the same time it eventually forces you to see the characters more as cultural caricatures rather than as fully fledged individuals- although you might not even realize it, which is another problem in itself.
Normally I don't mind the use of static characters in a novel to prove a point, but when taken to the extreme used here, it ends up feeling more like a straw-man attack on the worst qualities of these immigrant and British cultures, portraying them as flawed by definition and hence fundamentally incompatible with each other as a result, without accounting for what actually makes these cultures… well, work independently in the first place. And that’s not even accounting for the other problem other reviewers mention- that Smith’s narrator lacks any real voice of its own, defining itself only by what it is not. As one person has put it before, it's easier to criticize than create; at the end of the day, it's not really clear to me what exactly the narrator does approve of.
In all, I can tell that Smith is a talented writer no doubt, even though I’m not totally on board with the message her book seems to be going for. Still, I’d recommend White Teeth anyway; it’s quite unlike most fiction I’ve read in a while and manages to stay entertaining throughout. Then again, I haven’t read much immigrant-based fictional narratives aside from this, nor did I know that this was what White Teeth was about going in (it came from a rec I got... years ago)... so I guess the only solution is to read more!
