White Teeth
Ratings13
Average rating3.8
In the author's words, this is "an attempt at a comic family epic of Little England into which an explosion of ethnic colour is injected", telling the story of three families, one Indian, one white, one mixed, in North London and Oxford from World War 2 to now.
White teeth tells the story of three families, one Indian, one white, one mixed, in London and Oxford from World War II to the present. It spans 25 years of two families' assimilation in North London, home of the book's two unlikely heroes: prevaricating Archie Jones and intemperate Samad Iqbal. They met in the Second World War and have been best friends ever since. The Joneses and the Iqbals are an unlikely pairing of families, but their destinies distil the British Empire's history and hopes into a dazzling melange that is a pure joy to read.
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Impressive debut novel. I like the bits of the book that comprised dialogue or a glimpse of characters' lives and thoughts. But there were other bits that just kind of went on and on about things in a very expositional way. On and on and on. And on.
Apparently, most of my goodreads friends (those that have read it) felt fairly ambivalent about White Teeth. Perhaps, this is what caused me to delay picking it up for so long, but, fortunately, I really loved this! I guess it's exactly my kind of book; the novel on the dysfunctional family. Zadie Smith has crafted something brilliant here. Her humorous approach to the immigrant's experience in 20th century Britain really spoke to me. Smith doesn't hold back and her narration is heavy on sarcasm and irony, beautifully demonstrating the characters' frequent hypocrisy and ridiculousness. I understand that White Teeth is overly melodramatic at times (read: pretty much always), it's over the top and sometimes overly cynical, and, yes, most (read: all) the characters are fairly unlikeable at least some of the time. But. That's what I loved about it. It's chaotic and sprawling, with tons of outrageous bickering, and the messier it got, the more I loved it. Irie's rant towards the end of the book summed it up perfectly. (You know what rant I'm talking about if you've read the book and if you haven't I won't quote it here, because, believe me, it's worth waiting for!)
I enjoyed this. It's very funny and very charming. Why only three stars? I just couldn't get attached to any of the characters. I don't know if it was to do with the writing style or the bouncing around from generation to generation, but I did read that this novel had been turned into a play in London and couldn't help but feel this would have ticked more boxes for me in that format due to the quirkiness of the characters and comedy.
