Written by Zara Branigan
25 years since its publishing date, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth stands crooked and shining. The debut by the then-24-year-old Cambridge graduate was reportedly bought in advance for £250,000. From there, a sharp 500 pages about the intersecting past, present and future of two World War II veterans, Samad and Archie, and the many generations of their families.
Then, from there, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize 2000, the Guardian First Book Award, one of Time Magazine’s 100 Best English-language novels, the Booker-nominated ‘On Beauty’, the moving novella of ‘Swing Time’, Intimations, NW, The Fraud, and last month, her new essay collection — ‘Dead or Alive’. All the while, a quarter of a century passes.
When opening the novel that began it all, Smith quotes Shakespeare: “the past is prologue”. It is an augury for her characters, but also for the book’s narrative journey. From the neighbourhood of Willesden, to the death-drawn battlefields of France, the smoky gunfire of revolutionary India, and the swell of an earthquake in 20th-century Jamaica – it is right that Smith’s fictional places all find a path back to a quiet Stratford Playhouse. ‘The past is prologue’ and history bleeds.
At least Smith’s characters do. They also swear, chuckle, have affairs, and undergo quasi-religious encounters. They kill Nazis, conduct amateur kidnapping plots, and leave significant life changes to the flips of a coin. Smith wrote half a century later that her “kind of writing” describes the “liveable”. It does, and without a suffocating pretension (or pretention) of a certain literary veiling, no subject is too sacred, nor out of her critical sight.
Despite Smith’s anonymous, post-publishing comments that the novel was the equivalent of an “overexcited ten-year-old”, critics immediately placed her into the literary canon among Forster, Dickens, Rushdie. I would add Dahl and Chaucer, as ‘White Teeth’ clatters against Smith’s reputation as a merely graceful essayist. Take her description of the Headmaster, with a hairline that “had gone out and stayed out like a determined tide.” Or her observation of North London: “every street containing one defunct sandwich bar still advertising breakfast, one locksmith uninterested in marketing frills (KEYS CUT HERE) and one permanently shut unisex hair salon, the proud bearer of some unspeakable pun”.
Further, her winking, undercutting nomenclature (“E. Knock something or another”), knowing acronyms for militant student groups (“KEVIN”), infrequent capitalisation for important declarations (“You have the blatant hots for me…THE HOTS! BLATANTLY!”). It evokes the much-loved Dahl who wrote Fantastic Mr. Fox and the BFG. The playfulness of the older book is therefore a quieter, but no less meaningful, marker of what has changed in modern day Britain. Her unabashed and full-throated focus on immigration is another.
The three central families in ‘White Teeth’ are connected across Jamaica, Britain, India and Bangladesh. Smith interrogates what this shared history means for each family member and each country. Further, with today’s knee-jerk rejection of a shared history and refusal to consider a shared future, Smith’s joy in embodying familial, intergenerational stories pangs in the stomach. This is best captured in the quieter moments, notably when the oft-unsympathetic Samad interrupts Archie to state:
“If you are told ‘they are all this’…withhold your judgement until all the facts are upon you. That land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.”
Smith does not presume that she, nor her reader, knows what it means to be an immigrant, yet her willingness to show people as people is an immense contrast with today’s narrow, distanced imaginations of immigrants, migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.
Just as revolutionary is her rejection of any single narrative or viewing point. This occurs through the construction of the novel: the embodiment of multiple perspectives, the motif of twins, the deft use of free indirect speech, Archie flipping his coins. It is Chaucerian multiplicity at its finest and away from literary semantics, it makes for a good read.
‘White Teeth’ is not perfect. Smith is the first to admit it. Describing it as “calamitous” and “too long”, she has reportedly been unable to read it since. The novel has further been critiqued for being too mellifluous, too sharp, too crude – eminent critic James Wood called it, “an excess of storytelling”.
Yet, even with consensus on the messy Dickensian ending or “showy liveliness-liveliness” characterisation (Wood), one must concede that Smith’s articulation of the many perspectives is at least a flexing of her linguistic muscles. Her range falls from the exploits of a young Jehovah Witness with knocked-out teeth in the 1970s to a mousy, millennium teenager rebelling against his genetic engineer father. Even Wood, who coined the phrase “hysterical realism” during the Smith boom, stated: “she clearly does not lack for powers of invention”.
This may be the defining marker of White Teeth, indeed, its bite. In line with her debut, Smith today defends the inventive power of the fictional novel – a process she finds no separate from the day-to-day “continual fictionalisation” occurring through our relationships and interactions with one another. It is a process she describes to be imperfect, but grounded in compassion and empathy.
From ‘White Teeth’ to ‘Dead or Alive’, her body of literature can therefore be seen as substantive bulwarks against writing exactly what we know or acting in the precise trajectories of our surroundings. Smith asks us to surprise, to change, to be afraid of what’s coming next for a teenage girl caught with weed at Glenard Oak Comprehensive, to feel a gut punch from the friendship of two soldiers in Thessaloniki. To understand that individuals are not static, not an image nor number, but a person with a name and a story to tell.
With ‘White Teeth’, it is Smith’s commitment to a rarified process of compassion and her understanding that Britain has always existed as a multiplicity that mirrors the novel with the Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens of our past and hopefully, eventually, the Smiths of our future.
