"voyeurism, cinema verite, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt"
Written: Feb 03 '03 (Updated Jun 16 '05)
Product Rating:
Pros: Superb word usage, extraordinary powers of observation, wide-ranging without being difficult, funny cutting humor.
Cons: Cutting humor, cutting almost-everything; the measure of everyone and the value of no one?
The Bottom Line: A remarkable work whose flaws -- if only you have the patience, and i don't blame you if you don't -- turn out to be a trick of the dark.
voxpoptart's Full Review: Zadie Smith - White Teeth: A Novel
As a reviewer, i expect to provide plenty of words of my own, but sometimes a writer makes her own best case. White Teeth has a plot, and a structure, and both are well-handled, but not in a stay-up-all-night must-see-what-comes-next sort of way. Zadie Smith, at least as a 24-year-old debut novelist here, seems a journalist at heart, an omniscient visitor sending letters home. She's smart and talented, and she's out to dazzle. Therefore i think there's no point even trying to discuss White Teeth if you don't enjoy the samples i'll spend the next (and by far longest) section of this review providing, with thin annotation. This'll be a long goddam review, and i apologize, but: if this review's quotes are too long for you, what hope is there for her book itself?
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Sometimes her efficiency is quick: "His head was too large, as if his acne had applied to the zoning commission for expansion room and been approved". Or in the dialogue of characters, as when a young Bengali Londoner visits the well-meaning Chalfens for the first time:
"Well", said Joyce, "you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Willesden", said Irie and Millat simultaneously.
"Yes yes, of course, but where originally?"
"Ohhhhh", said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent, "you mean where from i am originally".
Joyce looked confused. "Yes, originally".
"Whitechapel", said Millat, putting out a cig. "Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus".
Or she's efficient in her David Foster Wallace-ian absurdity: i'm pleased to note that i caught the unfortunate acronym before the characters started remarking on it, when Millat joined the Keepers of the Eternal and Vigilant Islamic Nation.
More often her canvas is broader, using the small details to spiral outwards, as regarding Millat again: "He was arsey and mouthy, he had his fierce good looks squashed tightly inside him like a jack-in-the-box set to spring aged 13, at which point he graduated from leader of zit-faced boys to leader of women. The Pied Piper of Willesden Green, smitten girls trailing behind him, tongues out, breasts pert, falling into pools of heartbreak... and all because he was the BIGGEST and BADDEST, living his young life in CAPITALS; he smoked first, he drank first, he even lost it -- IT! -- aged 13 and a half. Ok, he didn't FEEL much or TOUCH much, it was MOIST and CONFUSING, he lost IT without knowing where IT went, but he still lost IT because there was no doubt, NONE, that he was the best of the rest, on any scale of juvenile delinquency he was the shining light..."
Her accuracy of observation certainly takes on the warm cliches that sitcoms win hearts with, too. "Samad had caught children like a disease. Yes, he had sired two of them willingly -- as willingly as a man can -- but he had not bargained for this other thing. This thing that no one tells you about. This thing of knowing children. For forty-odd years, traveling happily along life's highway, Samad had been unaware that, dotted along the road, in the creche facilities of each service station, there lived a subclass of society, a mewling, puking underclass... Then suddenly, in the early eighties, he became infected with other people's children, children who were friends of his children, and then their friends: then children in children's programs on children's TV. By 1984 at least 30% of his social and cultural circle was under the age of nine".
And for all this parental sacrifice, Zadie also takes Judith Rich Harris's side (read her the Nurture Assumption) against 99% of professional psychologists and 100% of politicians. An entire large subplot, and much of several others, is a convcing case study in the essential irrelevance of parental intent to how their children turn out, as opposed to the dominant factors of (1) genes and (2) friends and enemies, the non-overaged-clueless-dork peers among whom the children must negotiate the important details of status.
Lest the foibles of frustrated-father Samad or hazardously-cute Millat seem anti-male in tone, Zadie has no more sympathy for the Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them school of blame-pretending-to-be-self-help, which fat young Irie tries to resort to. As Zadie interjects, "It's a funny thing. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying 'Yeah, he just f---ed off and left me. He didn't love. He just couldn't deal with love'. Now how did that happen? What is it about this unlovable century that convinced us that we were, despite everything, eminently loveable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll -- then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greeting cards routinely tell us that everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water".
And one last passage, noteable even if you completely ignore the novel, which serves (though not in the plot itself) as perhaps the best explanation i have ever read of the curse of the 3rd-world and the origin of terrorism:
"To Alsana's mind, the real difference among people was not color. Nor did it lie in gender, faith, their relative ability to dance to a syncopated rhythm or open their fists to reveal a handful of gold coins... You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire, of the kind you find in a Women's Own on a Tuesday:
(a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?
(b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?
(c) Is there a chance (please check the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?
"Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth away from the witching hour... it is carefree, in the true sense of the term; it is light, losable like a key ring or a hair clip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree, drawing the figure of eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow the government on a whim, why not blind the man you hate, why not go gibbering through the town like a loon... There's nothing to stop you; or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute... People who live on solid ground, under safe skies, know nothing of this, they are like the English POW's in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off and the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is manmade.
"It is different for the people of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal... Half the time half the country lives underwater... the individual life expectancy is an optimistic 52, and they are coolly aware that when you talk about apocalypse, when you talk about random death en masse, well, they are leading the way in that particular field... Between Alsana's sweet 16th birthday (1971), for example, and the year she stopped speaking directly to her husband (1985), more people died in Bangladesh, more people perished in the winds and rain, than in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden put together. A million people lost lives they had learned to hold lightly in the first place".
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And so perhaps, even without the mandatory Pros/ Cons introduction to my review, you could see where my doubts might be heading. Every character in this novel gets long and persuasive passages from inside their heads, long exegesis in the languages of rationalization: but who can not notice her staying longest in the head of the prophet of doom? She reads you from inside, then steps back into the voice of omniscience, and omniscience doesn't appear to trust you. My distrust really hardened a little under halfway through, during the passage where she introduces the Chalfens. It's a splendid little passage: Mr. Chalfen's bustling, endless scientific curiosity and farflung experiments, Joyce Chalfen's cult-popular books that lightly disguise relationship tidbits as gardening advice, the intricate family in-jokes and family pride and roving discussions of ideas on everything. It's told with humor and seeming sympathy, and then Zadie steps back and tells me how bored, bored, bored they've become with their own company.
And here i know i don't buy it, because this, friends, this is my people. Mr. Chalfen would no more become bored with his FutureMouse (TM), or Josh with his roleplaying universes, than J. Henry Waugh or i would be with our fictional baseball leagues full of hundreds of vividly active men with beautiful names who are no less striving or quirky for their failure to technically exist. This is why i couldn't like the movie Say Anything, even though teen John Cusack was at his most adorable: if Ione Skye's character was 1/3 as clever and brilliant as her prizes indicated, she'd've been brilliant in Cusack's presence, not always but often, and she'd've been brilliant because it's fun, and he'd've enjoyed it. Zadie's assumption about the Chalfens is just as presumptuous, as dictatorial, as Hollywood's reduction of genius to loneliness -- and if she's too harsh there, why should i trust her elsewhere?
White Teeth empathizes with, but then scathingly exposes the flaws in, all of the following: religious fanaticism. Religious pseudo-belief. Rationalism. Middle-class privilege. Working-class struggle. Husbands on the dole. Husbands who work for a living. Brilliant scientists. Anti-science protestors. Involved parents. Apathy. Marriage. Unrequited love. Flitting from partner to partner. Writing passionate platonic letters to strangers. She's passionately anti-racism, but doesn't cut white Archie Jones, who marries black Clara Bowden by the end of the first chapter, much slack. About the only thing she hints at endorsing is adultery, and probably not even that, since it doesn't, in the end, happen, so she needn't attack it. What is this?
Or that, at least, transcribes the review in my head before the ending. Ah, the ending. Let's see... how to put this...
Okay. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you've had to hear Metallica's Master of Puppets plenty of times, enough to know that you hate it. Fine. I think you're wrong, indeed i think Master of Puppets is a friggin' masterpiece, but i can't imagine wanting to argue with you about it. James Hetfield has a stupid growl and writes smart-9th-grader lyrics, and the bass parts are endlessly repetitive, and the tunes aren't great: of course you might not like it. If its visceral kick in the behind misses your hind by eleven feet; if what feels like a dense labyrinth of riffs to me feels like small knob-twists adjusting the same pummeling nothingness to you; well, i understand.
But if you knowledgeably dislike They Might Be Giants -- and it's not just some random objection to John and John's voices, or to accordians, but a dislike of the songs themselves -- well, then i can't trust you for awhile. Because i have to assume your dislike stems from some belief that nihilism can't be funny, or anti-racism protests shouldn't be chirpy, or that "the sun is a mass of incandescent gas" doesn't belong in a song, or that people need to frown more; i have to believe, until proven otherwise, that we just have incompatible values. That would make me sad.
And similarly, a quick scan of other White Teeth reviews on Epinions sees the Pros/Cons format growing rapidly comic. Again and again we see "Cons: the ending". "Cons: the ending is kind of weak". "Cons: stupid ending". "Cons: whoever wrote the ending should be boiled in molten lava and then we should unlock the real Zadie Smith from wherever she's been stashed and stuff her with chocolates until she feels her time has been redeemed and she can go on writing again". "Cons: the ending", over and bloody over.
Well, i'll tell you this: the ending of White Teeth may be the best ending i've read in a book in years. For two reasons. The smaller is that, for a book paced like a series of essays, the ending ties everything together into a story: indeed, into a story where one starts turning pages faster, wanting -- after all -- to know what happens. There is a climax, and everything we learned about each character's internal journeys (both from inside and outside) comes to matter, at once.
The larger reason, though, is this: because maybe i've misread Zadie after all, somehow.
There is a song by a band called For Against whose chorus repeats: "I've fallen in love with all your flaws". There is a great love poem -- i forget the author, but it's collected and discussed in John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean? -- that details with delight its object's nearsightedness and clumsiness. And then, there is the ending of White Teeth. And i will say this: somehow, under all her vitriol, Zadie Smith loves Archie Jones, and Irie, and the mean-spirited Alsana and pathetic fake-pious Musad, and the rapscallion Millat and even the bright, middle-class Chalfens. I too doubt that everyone in the world deserves love, but everyone's brain gives off little reasons why they, individually, do, and somehow Zadie has spent enough time in these people's heads to see and feel those reasons after all.
I don't ask a writer to be always kind, you know. I know we humans are a long way from perfect. I know we can even be repellent. Still, i also believe anyone who basically spends her time _being_ repelled is missing the point. The strong hint that Zadie, as she dazzles away into literary trendiness, does NOT miss the point after all: well, i can't help it, it makes me really really happy. I'll have to save sadness, a bit, for my fellow readers who couldn't share that.
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