Date updated: 17/03/2023
On publication in the year 2000, White Teeth was an immediate sensation. Zadie Smith was thrust into the limelight for her novel, written in her final year at Cambridge, which secured a £250,000 advance on the basis of the opening chapters. Her fame and that of her novel was assured, and the novel went on to win prize after prize, with numerous critics celebrating its ability to capture a moment of contemporary London life.
Over twenty years later, we returned to this multi-generation multicultural family saga and unfortunately were left rather disappointed. Several members of the group remember reading it at the time and were surprised to find a re-reading a difficult prospect. White Teeth is a long novel - over 500 pages - and Smith's desire to cram the plot with details, back stories, jokes and asides can be seen as charming but was found to be ultimately frustrating. One reader described how she felt blocked by the sheer mass of it, others described it as baggy and unfocused. Several readers admitted not being able to reach the end. Smith's breezy satirical tone pokes fun at everyone and leaves all her characters subject to mockery, but this tone has one note and becomes exhausting over the course of the book.
More than one reader expressed being bored by the characterisations, that they weren't rounded or rich enough. Personally, I felt the character that I wanted to hear more from was Irie, shuttled between houses, drowned out by the louder voices round her and quietly getting on with the difficult business of being a teenager. Archie and Samad, unlikely friends who meet in Europe during the dregs of WW2 start as the centre of the plot, as we learn of their marital strife, their anxieties for their families, their concerns about the changing nature of the world around them. But as more and more characters come into the mix, the focus shifts and is lost - the introduction of the cringeworthy Chalfens drowns out the voices of the other characters. Samad's battles with his sons allows Smith to explore issues around cultural heritage, post-colonialism, and the gulf that can exist between first and second generation immigrants in London and this really was where the novel's focus could have rested - there is so much to explore in the notion that "immigrants cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow". Instead we are spun into the "future mouse" plot line, and an increasingly ridiculous series of plot points as Smith tries to tie these innumerable threads together.
Smith herself is one of the harshest critics of her novel. She looks back and describes it at the "literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10 year old" and has expressed her dissatisfaction with the final result. The novel owes a great deal to the work of Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, and Angela Carter and is surprisingly indebted to an earlier generation of British writers despite being lauded as a voice of a new generation. Smith's voice in the novel is irrepressible, the novel is overstuffed with ideas, and one has to admire this capacity - even if it she doesn't pull it off. The critic James Wood has famously described this novel as an example of "hysterical realism", part of a trend of novels reliant on endless plots in which "information had become the new character". A fascinating exchange between Wood and Smith discussing this accusation, and the role of fiction after 9/11 was published in the Guardian newspaper here.
One of the things that struck this reader about the novel was its optimism about London. Cultural tensions, where they appear are played for laughs and Smith portrays a melting pot London that in many ways is an authentic representation of the London most of us live in. An American reader suggested this was allied with her own perspective on London as an outsider. We discussed whether this is what London felt like at the time - the Blair government still very popular, London the centre of cool Britannia, the millennium era in full swing and how our disappointment with the novel might be aligned with the changing circ*mstances we have seen since: 9/11, 7/7, Brexit, Covid. Perhaps London now feels more divided, a harder place to live and thrive. We wondered whether White Teeth is now too much a book of its time. We also considered whether as readers, the challenges of living in a particular time mean that we demand more from contemporary novels about the city.
Thanks again to all attendees for your frank and fascinating discussions about this book.
