Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
“White Teeth, by the young British writer Zadie Smith, is not one of your typical small, semiautobiographical first novels. It’s a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie with a nod to indie movies like My Beautiful Laundrette, a novel that’s not afraid to tackle large, unwieldy themes. It’s a novel that announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer — a writer who at the age of 24 demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that’s street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time. This, White Teeth announces, is someone who can do comedy, drama and satire, and do them all with exceptional confidence and brio.
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“Beneath its antic surface, White Teeth opens out to become a meditation on the varieties of historical experience and the impact that cultural and familial history can have on the shape of an individual’s life. It is about immigration and exile and the legacy of British colonialism; it is about roots and rootlessness and the contradictory yearnings for freedom and connection.
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“For Ms. Smith, Archie and Samad are representatives of two worldviews: one practical-minded and pragmatic, the other ideological and absolutist; one accepting of randomness as a byproduct of freedom, the other determined to try to stage-manage fate.
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“Though Ms. Smith grows a bit long-winded in discussing these groups’ millennial schemes, her gift for sympathetic characterization enables her to satirize her peoples’ vanities and self-delusions without ever seeming patronizing or judgmental. In recounting the story of Archie and Samad’s families, she shows not only how one generation often revolts against another — sons against fathers, daughters against mothers — but also how they repeat their predecessors’ mistakes, retrace their ancestors’ dreams, and in the case of those who are immigrants, commute nervously between the poles of assimilation and nationalism, the embrace of the Other and a repudiation of its temptations.
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“These characters are all players in Ms. Smith’s riotous multicultural drama, living out their stories on her chessboard of postcolonial dreams and frustrations, and yet at the same time, they’ve been limned with such energy and bemused affection that they possess the quirks and vulnerabilities of friends and neighbors we’ve known all our lives. In what will surely rank as one of her generation’s most precocious debuts, Ms. Smith announces herself as a writer of remarkable powers, a writer whose talents prove commensurate with her ambitions.”
