Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Rating: 4/5
Trigger Warnings: suicide, violence, war, domestic abuse?
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
I’ll try to narrow my statements just to White Teeth but I’m still going to open by saying Zadie Smith is an incredible writer, with an ability to combine realism with wit: she shows normal human lives but makes them some of the most entertaining 500 pages I’ve had the pleasure of reading.
I ordered the book for one of my university modules and was slightly peeved to realise how long it was. It sounded like an exciting read, sure, but I thought it was going to be a bit of a slog to get through it. Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong. Split into 4 sections covering different family members, White Teeth moved rapidly through the lives of three families, telling their individual stories, as well as their collective experiences, moving from World War 2 to the Millenium.
Looking back at the beginning of the book, it’s hard to believe where it ends up. To me, before anything else, White Teeth is a story of growth and of movement. You could track every character from their introduction and watch the ways in which they change and mature, making them so much more human than character. I can feel proud of them, and disappointed in them, angry at their reactions, or sorry for their situation. There was something so genuinely human about Smith’s writing. I hadn’t realised it until my housemate pointed it out, but the humour throughout seriously added to this effect; it was full of funny little observations about human flaws, about our foibles, and the way we reason things to ourselves.
One of the obvious things to talk about when reviewing White Teeth is the representation. I can’t speak for how well represented the various groups mentioned are, but just the span of representation impressed me. ‘Slice of life’ tends to mean a depiction of the mundane aspects of life, but this felt like a real ‘slice of life’ because it was a real cross section of humans; Bengali Muslims, second-generation Jamaican immigrants, Jewish scientists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses became involved with each other and whilst their cultures clashed, they showed how real people live alongside others.
Alsana and Clara were particular favourites of mine. Alsana proclaimed to be a traditionalist, but underneath it all you could tell it was her children who were most important to her. I also really appreciated Neena - the niece of shame. Her sexuality came up a couple of times, and whilst Alsana claimed to disapprove, she was still always there for her niece, willing to ask for her help and to accept her controversial opinions. Neena was brilliant in herself, clearly caring for Magid, Millat, and Irie, understanding a little more what they were going through because she was closer to their age. Though neither Clara or Archie really knew how to help Irie, I still have great respect for Clara: she began as this young girl running from her family’s religion, but she became a strong woman who wanted the best for her daughter. I think my favourite line about Clara was when she tries to defend Archie on the bus near the end of the book, but words fail her because she is ‘unused to defending her husband and unsure of the necessary adjective’. It just made me laugh because she’s spent her life with this man, and there is clearly some kind of love between them by the end of the book, even if it starts of questionably, and yet she isn’t sure how to defend him.
I loved having every character’s point of view. They all seemed so sure of themselves when talking to each other, but when you looked at their inner thoughts not one of them had the confidence that they displayed externally. They weren’t infallible, and they all knew it.
The ending was one of those that left me with questions. It didn’t wrap things up entirely, giving hints of where the characters would be in a couple of years time, but offering only this snapshot, instead ending on the image of a genetically modified mouse running away from a room full of people. This sparked a lot of conversation between a friend and I on where we’d like to see these characters end up, and I love that about a book. Open endings are good, but open endings where you want to fill in the loose ends are even better.
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