Sink your teeth into this debut

WHITE TEETH
By Zadie Smith
Penguin Fiction, 542 pages
Available at Powerbooks

From the first few sprawling, Dickensian pages of Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth, you know you’re in capable hands. You may not always know or predict where those hands are going to take you, but they are able hands. Smith, 26 or so, is a precocious talent the likes of which rumble out of London every few seasons. No short stories or slim autobiographical volumes for her: White Teeth is an epic, if often surprisingly light and comical. In fact, the rollicking ease of her style may disguise the fact that she has many things to say about race, generations, and life in the late 20th century.

Intertwining the lives of Englishman Archibald Jones and Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal – two unlikely friends who meet during WW2, marry respective wives, raise kids and generally work out their place in the universe – the novel takes us into unexpected areas of modern London life. From the Jamaicans who become Jehovah’s Witnesses, thumping on strangers’ doors to warn them about the coming apocalypse, to the Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who make their way in England’s blue-collar-and-rising world, White Teeth is a clear-eyed and large-hearted view of what really matters in life.

The matter of caring for your teeth, for instance. Orthodontic references abound, as you would expect from a book called White Teeth. Chapters are titled "Canines: The Ripping Teeth" and "The Root Canals of Mangal Pande," and it’s not all for comic effect. Teeth, as we all know from old TV detective shows, are very useful in identifying bodies altered beyond recognition, and the cast of characters in White Teeth go through all sorts of mutations. East or West, brown or white, young or old, you’ve got to take care of those teeth:

And when your teeth rot,’ continued Mr. Hamilton, smiling at the ceiling, ‘aaah, there’s no return. The important thing is the third molars, more commonly referred to as the wisdom teeth, I believe. You simply must deal with the third molars before anything else. The problem with the third molars is that one is never sure if one’s mouth will be quite large enough to accommodate them. They are the only part of the body that a man must grow into. He must be a big enough man for these teeth, do you see? Because if not – oh dear me, they grow crooked or any which way, or refuse to grow at all. They stay locked up there with the bone – an impaction, I believe is the term – and terrible, terrible infection ensues. Because they’re your father’s teeth, you see, wisdom teeth are passed down by the father, I’m certain of it.’

For Irie and Millat, the children of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, such loony-tune observations are simply part of life’s passing parade. It is for the reader to piece together all the dental lore in White Teeth, a bit of inventiveness on Smith’s part which occasionally feels applied like a new set of dentures, but never without purpose. Teeth are not simply a benign metaphor, but one of violence and rending: teeth tear apart, and lying just beneath the gentle comedy of this novel are the unholy ravages between race, blood, culture, class and sex.

While Archie and Samad cling to the past – one of war victories and easy definitions, and, in Samad’s case, a strict Muslim belief which threatens to hurtle his family into oblivion – the kids, Irie and Millat, mingle and mix in the New London of the ‘80s and ‘90s: products of modern life, speaking a patois of London dialect, Indian accent and Jamaican rasta-speak:

They were of a breed: Raggastani. It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indie kids, wide-boys, ravers, rude-boys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani.

This mixture of Western pop and Islamic fundamentalism may seem pretty volatile in light of 9-11 and the "global war on terrorism." Zadie Smith shares a tongue-in-cheek, rationalist’s view of Islam with Salman Rushdie, whose writing style she often evokes. White Teeth does not dance around the topic of East meets West (or rather, if it does, it dances pretty funkily); there’s a lot to chew on here about the difficulty of reconciling an Islamic belief system with a Western capitalist world.

The young Smith possesses a fine grasp of the many varieties and realities that exist behind all the labels of East and West. She seems to have her feet planted on the ground throughout, and it’s this essential humanism that comes through in White Teeth. Call it Dickens for the New London Mix, or call it what you like: White Teeth is worth all the extra brushing.