Another
enormously entertaining read for me during 2018 was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, published in 2000. It’s set
where she grew up, in Willesden, London NW2, where fragments of the crumbled
British Empire have found their way home. Two war buddies, Archie Jones and
Samad Iqbal, are raising their children there. Archie and his Jamaican wife
Clara have one daughter, Irie. Samad and Alsana Iqbal have twin boys, Magid and
Millat, both loved by Irie for as long as she can remember. To try to save
Magid from all the secular and materialist influences of modern London, Samad
sends him back to Bangladesh—a kidnap, really, that not only alienates Samad
from his wife but also backfires: Magid grows up to be a “pukka” Englishman and
godless, while Millat goes through various stages of juvenile delinquency and
is then brainwashed by a radical Islamist group called KEVIN—Keepers of the
Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. Smith has managed to capture the
sullenness of the teens, who feel themselves neither here nor there, but she
also has watched the parents who can’t be sure that the “good life” has really
been all that good for them or their children. And her grasp of the accents of
her varied neighborhood, as well as a pretty good sense of the absurd, means
that all of this is kept funny.
In their
teens Millat and Irie are caught smoking pot with a boy named Joshua Chalfen,
and the school orders compulsory study sessions at Joshua’s parents’ house (a
very upper middle class, intellectual, clever, and self-satisfied Brit household
that Smith dissects hilariously), where both Millat and Irie are so welcomed
that it alienates Joshua, who joins his own group, a militant animal rights
group called FATE—Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation. For different
reasons, both KEVIN and FATE decide to disrupt Joshua’s father’s public
unveiling of his big project, a genetically-engineered mouse. All of the
dramatis personae show up for this climactic scene.
Smith
has disparaged this first novel of hers as juvenile work. All I can say is,
some juvenile, and some work.
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