White Teeth by Zadie SmithVintage International, 2001 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2000)

I’ve been meaning to read this book for approximately a decade now, and am glad I finally did. On the most basic level it’s the story of two friends—Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal, who met when they served in WWII together—and their families. But it’s also about families in general, and culture and history (the theme of “roots” is a big one), and immigrant experiences and cross-cultural friendships and marriages and affairs; it’s about people growing up and England changing over time. It’s about familial anxieties and millennial anxieties and class anxieties. It’s sprawling and funny and really satisfyingly constructed: images and phrases reappear, sometimes taking on different connotations as the book progresses, but it manages to work, it manages not to feel gimmicky. The book spans decades, jumps back and forth in time, and also shifts focus from character to character, but this also works: multiplicity (of cultures, of interpretations of history, of beliefs) is so central to the book, so it makes sense to have multiple focal points for the narrative, too.

And Smith’s style is a delight, funny and sharp. I loved this moment early in the book, when Archie is miserable about his recent divorce and Samad tells him to forget about it and about his ex-wife: “And you? You have picked up the wrong life in the cloakroom and you must return it” (11). Also early in the book, there’s this, about the woman who ends up being Archie’s second wife: “A typical teenage female panopticon, she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps long before they ever spoke” (24). “Typical teenage female panopticon”! What a phrase.

Elsewhere: if you want to read more about this book (and if you haven’t read it and want to know more about the plot), Michiko Kakutani reviewed it in 2000 and called it “a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie with a nod to indie movies like ”My Beautiful Laundrette,” a novel that’s not afraid to tackle large, unwieldy themes.” Indeed!