"White Teeth" - Zadie Smith

Title: White Teeth
Author: Zadie Smith
About the Book: Fiction, Comedy, Immigrants
My rating: 7/10.

I would enthuse wildly, but there's nothing to enthuse about. I would bash, but there's not much to bash. I'm pretty much 'meh' about this book. I expected more.

The first time I saw White Teeth it was in a huge ad on the side of my favorite bookstore. I looked at it, read whatever was written underneath and decided it was probably a serious book about racial issues, so I wasn't really interested. Incidentally, I was wrong about the first part. The book's a comedy through and through. But it's still about racial issues.

So eventually, when it was one of the options on my reading list for a Master's class and one of my colleagues recommended it with approximately the same enthusiasm I save for my own very dearest books, I decided I'd give it a try. The many favorable blurbs and awards were also in its favor.

First impression: the cover was impossibly colorful. Second impression: the way the book starts is light, humorous. Perhaps a bit too much, just like the colors of the cover. I like my books to have realism, to delve into the psychology of characters, to sparkle. I want to feel that things are real even when they're entirely unrealistic - which is what the first pages of the book entirely failed to do. Still, a deliberate lack of realism is a style in itself, so I tried to get over my disappointment.

The plot starts with Archie Jones, a 47 year-old man who intends to commit suicide by gassing himself. However, he is interrupted because he parked in such a way as to impede the delivery to a butcher's. Quote from the book: "'No one gasses himself on my property,' Mo snapped as he marched downstairs. 'We are not licensed.'" Archie realizes that he actually wants to leave, ends up at a New Year's party, where he meets the 19 year-old Clara, a beautiful black Jamaican whose teeth were knocked out in a motorcycle accident, and they marry in no time because she comes from a Jehova's Witnesses family and her upbringing gets her to somehow decide that she wants this man and she needs to marry him.

Mostly, the first part of the book feels like a rushed comedy. Imitated accents, characters sketched rather than portrayed, all sorts of unrealistic happenings, weird tics, but a humor that saves the day, I suppose. I can understand the appeal the book had to the critics: post-modernism, today's cultural movement, is intensely political. It just loves its minorities, colonials, race differences, culture clash and whatnot, sometimes to the point where the art trails behind the ideology. And if it's something this book has, it's minorities (religious, cultural, racial). There's Jamaicans and Jews, English and Bangladeshi, black, white, Islam, Jehova's Witnesses, scientists and just people off the street... It seems to have everything. For the first hundred pages, my question was just "Why?" The plot was contrived, the characters flat, everything essentially seemed to be there just to make the cultural clash humor go on.

Later, however, Smith starts to get into it. Her characters gain some weight, some greater motivation, some personality. Not a lot, mind you. Just enough so they can function as people and you can understand their motivation and their decisions. You can feel life seeping into these people, mostly when the second generation - Archie's daughter and his best friend's twin sons - come into play. The characters start bouncing off on each other in all sorts of ways, children get 'adopted' by other parents, while those parents tend to ignore their own offspring, there's a generation clash, much sexuality that is hard to handle (not that we ever get to actually feel it, but just observe its effects on the characters) and a ton of problems that spring everywhere, which are handled not in the best of ways.

Overall, however, the book doesn't do it for me. The characters are mostly observed from the outside, like in family photos, not really seen from the inside. The plot seems to exist on and off, to have no real point in existing. Even though in the last pages somebody gets shot, there's no real climax, no ending.

...meh. I'm too disappointed and neutral about it to come up with anything more interesting to say...

You can get it here.