White Teeth
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3.9 • 253 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence.
Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.
At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith.
“[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Sure, she’s been compared to biggies like Dickens and Chekhov. But once you enter the mad world of Zadie Smith’s smashing first novel—set in the multicultural magnificence and malevolence of late 20th-century London—you’ll know you’ve never encountered another writer like her. As Smith weaves her boisterous, century-spanning story about the impact of class, religion, race, and gender on the families of two old friends (a working-class Londoner and a Bengali Muslim immigrant), she reveals unexpected talents. She’s a spot-on mimic, an expert juggler, a sociologist, hypnotist, tragicomedian, and, best of all, an optimist who loves rather than bemoans humanity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The scrambled, heterogeneous sprawl of mixed-race and immigrant family life in gritty London nearly overflows the bounds of this stunning, polymathic debut novel by 23-year-old British writer Smith. Traversing a broad swath of cultural territory with a perfect ear for the nuances of identity and social class, Smith harnesses provocative themes of science, technology, history and religion to her narrative. Hapless Archibald Jones fights alongside Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal in the English army during WWII, and the two develop an unlikely bond that intensifies when Samad relocates to Archie's native London. Smith traces the trajectory of their friendship through marriage, parenthood and the shared disappointments of poverty and deflated dreams, widening the scope of her novel to include a cast of vibrant characters: Archie's beautiful Jamaican bride, Clara; Archie and Clara's introspective daughter, Irie; Samad's embittered wife, Alsana; and Alsana and Samad's twin sons, Millat and Magid. Torn between the pressures of his new country and the old religious traditions of his homeland, Samad sends Magid back to Bangladesh while keeping Millat in England. But Millat falls into delinquency and then religious extremism, as earnest Magid becomes an Anglophile with an interest in genetic engineering, a science that Samad and Millat repudiate. Smith contrasts Samad's faith in providence with Magid's desire to seize control of the future, involving all of her characters in a debate concerning past and present, determinism and accident. The tooth--half root, half protrusion--makes a perfect trope for the two families at the center of the narrative. A remarkable examination of the immigrant's experience in a postcolonial world, Smith's novel recalls the hyper-contemporary yet history-infused work of Rushdie, sharp-edged, fluorescent and many-faceted.
Customer Reviews
London Views
How could someone so young write this kind of book. It’s amazing. It’s funny, intelligent, very vivid. London is all over the place. The dialogue is exceptional. A minor criticism: it’s a bit uneven, the characters lose some of their initial pizzazz and flatten out in the second half. The ending felt forced and took too much energy to get there. But these are minor quibbles in an otherwise breathtaking book.
White Teeth
Rarely do I toss aside a book unfinished. Kept thinking it would captivate me. Never did.