Book Tamers| book reviews

Evil needs to be cut from the root, people say. And when your teeth hurt, it means one has a problem with the roots. It’s not surprising that characters in White Teeth search for roots: cultural, ethnic, historical, as long as they live in an ineffable world, where nothing can be predicted or guessed and where nothing can be controlled. The explanation must reside in the past. For almost twenty five years, the Jones and the Iqbal families are in the middle of a saga that gets from tragic to hilarious, from small things to big history.

Archibald Jones knows Samad Iqbal during the second world war; a supposedly heroic act unites them; then, there are the weaknesses: Muslim Samad makes deals with Allah in order to be absolved of some little corruption imposed by modern world, and Archie lives his days as they pass him by. He has a first bad marriage, he gets stopped from committing suicide, and he falls for Clara, who has no teeth in the front of her mouth. He has a girl, Irie, who tries to find herself in the Jamaican story of her grandmother, Hortensia, born in an earthquake and convinced that Jehovah’s witnesses show the end of the world to sinners.

On the other side, Samad has long speeches about the European world’s perversity, compared to Bangladesh’s honesty, always on the verge of a catastrophe. His main obsession is however perverted, for the glorious role in the world’s history that he wants to assign to his roots- grandfather Mangal Pande – is inexistent. It seems his heirs, twins Millat and Magid, already Europeanized, get to know more profoundly what defines them, after long searches for identity. Samad remains a wanderer, he never succeeds in going from intention to action. His sons are the perfect image of the two worlds where he no longer finds his place: Millat gets in touch with a fundamentalist movement named KEVIN, and Magid participates in a glorious project of genetics.

As the characters’ lives, narration ramifies visibly, becoming hard to control or explained without detailing or deviating. Of course, a novel of these proportions and structure doesn’t present only “ the animal in its own habitat”, the environment being a cosmopolite London, visible in its behavior and values for those who know it, but get beyond- with the help of humor and empathy- naturalist observation. Moreover, the moralizing note, controversy (the Future’s Mouse genetic experiment), parallelism, and type phrases and divagations are very natural.

The great Literary Discovery, as Sunday Times calls her, this remarkable debut, as following volumes, The Autograph Man and On Beauty, seem to lead to the conclusion, maybe hasty, that Zadie Smith will be counted amongst the 21st century’s classics. Anyway, White Teeth is an excellent epic construction, written with verve, humour and commitment, that I recommend with no hesitation.

Written by: Mihaela