April 2005: White Teeth (Smith)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 6:20:53 PM

Seven of us (and one late-comer) settled down in Betsey's living room and after very little small-talk launched into the question of why White Teeth by Zadie Smith has the title it does. Certainly there were subtle references and ironies, but we weren't clear. Two people had read it years previously and remembered it as being good, recent readers had mixed responses about which parts of the book were too slow, too unbelievable. Criss-crossing the room were disagreements about the interest and development of the characters, the plausibility of some of the relationships, and the viability of gracefully covering all the necessary details for its rather complex cast list and plot, but also appreciation for how much she covered in one first novel and the dialects of language she captured in print.

Like The Gangster We Are All Looking For and even Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, this book explored cultural and generational fractals: bifurcation and repetition, teenage rebellion and idealizing homelands.

Trying to describe the book in a sentence, we proposed "the absurdity of the immigrant experience in modern North London" and "immigrants concerned with losing their culture just as locals worried about immigrants shifting their neighborhoods." Looking at the book from this broader perspective, we noticed the theme of fanatical groups throughout the book, from the Jehovah's Witnesses to the Muslim K.E.V.I.N. group, which merits more discussion perhaps, but we diverted to marvel at the ideas about The Rapture--something not everyone knows about. (For more information see the description from Wikipedia and some more depth and history at www.religioustolerance.org/rapture.htm.)

Shuffling though an abundance of book-title suggestions and continuing some discussion of politics, we decided to step away from stories of immigrant experience and dive into social-political musings.