Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

Possibly the hype with which it's publication was accompanied is one of the reasons why I avoided White Teeth at the time, although friends lived near to the area of London in which it's set. Finally getting around to reading it all these years later, I'm reading it from another vantage point again, from the other side of the barrier that it confronts in it's narrative of the intertwined histories of three families of different racial backgrounds in post-war Britain. I'm married to a woman who grew up in a different country, whose skin is a different colour to mine, part of an Indian family which stretches half way around the world, just as she is now part of an English family which is stretched across England and Wales. I'm part of the 'multicultural Britain' of which lazy journalists claimed the book was a celebration. Not that I ever walk around thinking about myself in such terms, because how ridiculously pretentious would that be? If I ever reflect on my marriage, it's first and foremost to acknowledge how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful person. Where she was born, where I was born, are irrelevancies.

Whether that actually has much effect on my reading experience I'm not really sure. In fact, White Teeth rather took me back to the time it was published. Even the RRP (£6.99) on the back of the edition I picked up from a charity shop reminds me of an earlier time in the history of the British publishing industry, when I began buying books rather than getting them from the library, when books weren't so expensive. That period towards the end of the nineties for a few years when it was somehow 'cool' to be Indian. As though that was something which counts as a choice. More accurate perhaps to say that it was a moment when certain TV programs, films, books and music were considered to be cool because they could be defined as 'Indian'. Bollywood was filtering through into popular conciousness, even if most people still hadn't actually seen a Bollywood film. We got the stereotype though. We had a generation of British Asians who'd grown up in this country, some of whom, like anyone else, were now producing culture which reflected their experiences. Actually, you could say that it was part of a trend which started earlier, as far back as the early eighties. And of course, this was a very muddled sense of what 'Indian' actually means, since alongside such things as Bend It Like Beckham, Goodness Gracious Me and Cornershop's 'Brimful of Asha', it included East is East, a film about a British Pakistani family living in Bradford in the seventies. It's not wrong exactly, since 'India' is a name for both the country and the sub continent of which that country is the largest part, but it does feel entirely in keeping with that old British assumption, 'Oh, they're all the same!' Zadie Smith makes a joke out of this general confusion with her book's Asian family coming from Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan, formerly India, formerly Bengal), part of the novel's general theme of the indeterminacy of national or cultural roots, their unreliability as a guide for the present.

White Teeth was definitely positioned by cultural commentators as being a part of that moment, the author herself rapidly placed on a pedestal, and the book quickly adapted into a TV series I never watched. It's perhaps no surprise that her follow up was a novel about the culture of modern celebrity and then after that she moved to America both literally and metaphorically (her third novel, On Beauty which transplants Howard's End to the American Midwest). And of course, none of these things were exactly 'Indian'. Goodness Gracious Me flopped when it was shown in India, because it was essentially British humour. Many of the jokes depended on the negotiation with the dominant white British culture.

Of course, Zadie Smith isn't Indian either, born to a Jamaican mother and white British father (and as far as I can tell from the interviews I've read, she identifies herself as black and British). Perhaps my memory is somewhat at fault here, but if commentators did position the book within a narrative where it might not quite belong, you can see why, when the character who comes to dominate the novel's multiracial cast is the 'Bangledeshi' Samad Iqbal. A genuinely moving portrait of an immigrant to Britain who is terrified of being swamped by the people and the culture of his new country, a neat reversal of the common complaint often heard from this country's white racism. Both stylistically and in terms of subject matter with a focus on immigration, Zadie Smith is obviously stepping somewhat in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie, which will no doubt also have helped the identification, although her style is equally indebted to Martin Amis. But it's also obviously, confidently her. Never swamped by any obvious influence.

Reading Zadie Smith's interviews I found I really warmed to her as a person. She comes across as very likable, also curious and detirmined. All admirable qualities of course, but part of it may also simply be my age. I'm in my early 30s now, and so far I've read nothing by an author younger than me (Gwendoline Riley was born the same year, so is probably a few months younger); little enough by authors who might be just a few years older. So Zadie Smith is (almost) my contemporary. The viewpoint the novel has on the 80s - a decade I both grew up in, and of which I have read a good many fictional representations - especially the scenes set in school, is one I recognise more than any other. It's an odd way to judge a novel's success, especially since I went to very different schools at the opposite end of the country, but there's a personal closeness here at times. White Teeth is hardly an autobiographical text, but she's clearly used some of her own memories for the texture of the world as the narrative comes nearer to the present. Obviously Irie Jones isn't Zadie Smith, but she shares the author's heritage. What I've read Zadie Smith describe as her desire to possess an English literary culture from which she felt excluded is metamorphosed into her character Irie Jones' desire for the middle class culture of the Chalfens, the characters who are the novel's broadest caricatures. She's hardly the first writer to reflect how intimately bound up this country's literary culture is with class. Nor is it an anxiety which is exclusively felt by working class individuals.

*

Whilst I was reading it, my wife kept asking me why the book was called White Teeth. I couldn't answer her really, and the novel never really gives us a clear answer, beyond using it as a metaphor for chapter titles. If I had to guess I'd say that put crudely our teeth are the one bit of us which is the same colour no matter what the colour of our skin. More interesting is the way it's employed as a metaphor for exploring the personal histories of several of her characters, and the intersections of those histories with larger national histories. Christening these chapters the 'root canal' for the character concerned makes an obvious point. I've never experienced a root canal, but I understand they're supposed to be painful, and so it proves here. History is always something traumatic, something which the novel's ending, flashing forward to the eve of the millenium, seems to offer some hope for a respite from. The ending feels rather rushed (oddly, given the novel's length!), appearing to suggest that finally we can escape our personal and national histories, and might be the least satisfactory part of the book. Not that Zadie Smith suggests such an 'escape' is at all easy, given the traumas her characters are subject to, but it's a hope which seems peculiarly typical of the nineties to me.

By which I mean, the culture of the nineties in Britain, as I'm coming to understand it, was one marked by a deep anxiety about the past. The past became something which was both recycled endlessly in popular culture, largely as pastiche, and also something to be feared. We were a culture which had successfully triumphed over History, which may help to explain why towards the end of the decade we elected a reactionary government which was in constant denial of its past as a left wing political party.

In itself though, the desire to escape from the suffocation of the past is one with which it is easy to feel sympathetic. The suspicion towards history which the novel articulates at various points is not a wholesale rejection of history, but it does suggest that it is generally untrustworthy. It's hard though to see as it were, what comes next, to see the point we might reach supposing we can escape our histories. Which is perhaps one of the reasons why we need fiction. So the ending feels a little rushed and unsatisfactory, but otherwise this is a magnificent romp through post-war British history. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it!

"You see, the whole country of the system is juxtaposition by the haemoglobin in the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity…"

 

from Amar, Ackbar, Anthony (1977)

Missing Margate

In London the meetings never end; the curiously stylised self-importance that patinas the fundamental banality of their careerist participants must be endlessly serviced by ritual, an egomania masquerading as the exchange of information.

Michael Bracewell, Missing Margate

Michael Hoffmann - Twentieth century German Poetry: An Anthology

Another review I wrote for amazon. I can remember being reasonably pleased with how this one turned out.

Michael Hofmann – Twentieth Century German Poetry: An Anthology

Poetry/History

An interesting choice of cover, especially given the editor and translator Michael Hofmann's praise for German poetry in his introduction on the grounds that so much of it addresses the world outside rather than being confined to the ivory tower. Certainly the twentieth century has marked German history in a number of ways, of which the Berlin Wall is one of the clearest symbols. Being one of those many English people who are mono-lingual and therefore dependant on translators, Michael Hofmann has become a translator I feel I can trust (although here he also reprints translations by other hands), one who possesses both the skill and taste for the works he translates, as is evident from his nicely polemical introduction. 

If I have one criticism of this volume, it would be that that's all we get in the way of critical apparatus. Some of the poets I've encountered before, but many are previously unknown, and a little more biographical information on each poet than just their dates would have been a real help, especially in the later part of the book when Germany was divided (there's that wall again!). It's usually not too difficult to work out which side of the divide individual poets found themselves, but especially with poets represented sometimes by only a single poem, it can sometimes feel as if they are emerging from a void, with only Hofmann's introduction for guidance. 

That aside, this is a magnificent collection, which whets one's appetite for more, especially of those poets who are sometimes sparsely represented. Surely evidence of a task successfully achieved. And it provides plenty of justification for Hofmann's provocative claim that Germany was one of *the* places for poetry in the twentieth century. I wonder if that is a claim which will stand up over the course of the twenty-first. It is of course very difficult to surmise from such a brief survey, and even the best critic is going to miss important work, especially when it is that published nearest to one's own time, but I couldn't help feeling the weakest, or perhaps just the least significant, work in this collection came from the most recent poets. Which connects with that interesting choice of cover. Perhaps that wall, that history, was an important spur to great work which is now past.

Geoff Dyer, Working the Room

Always back up. Always back up. I wasn't entirely happy with a few posts, I'd ended up taking too long over them, and had saved them to a memory stick. This was probably about 6 months ago, you understand. And now I find I've managed to delete them by mistake. Always back up.

It's not like they were the greatest things ever written anyway. I really need to stop agonising so much over writing this blog, if I'm ever to get something written for it.

So, can I try and reconstruct this from memory? It'll probably end up as a bunch of notes, which is maybe how it should have been written in the first place.

- The cover to my paperback edition of Geoff Dyer's second collection of essays and reviews places the author at it's centre, holding a map and gazing out at us. Surrounding him is a drawing of a maze, with a thin red line running through it, ending at Dyer's casually held map. I mention the cover, because it seems to perfectly captured representation of Dyer's idealised self image which I've encountered in a number of places now. Essentially, in his own words, he is a 'literary gatecrasher', unconcerned with formal boundaries between different kinds of writing, his own work ranges across a variety of fictional and non-fictional forms, as he blithely follows his interests wherever they may take him. Becoming intensely interested in a new subject is only a way to stave off the boredom now inspired by the subject he previously enjoyed so intensely, a means of staving off boredom and depression.

- Anglo-English Attitudes, his first collection of reviews and other pieces, must be the first place I encountered this self image of his. It probably wasn't the first book of Geoff Dyer's I read, but it was certainly the first one I encountered in what I remember were several admiring reviews. The feeling it inspired in me was an opening of horizons. It felt liberating, as though a person really could be interested in everything. It made me aware of things and writers I'd previously been unaware of, or even dismissed: photography, Roland Barthes, Milan Kundera, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Boa Ninh's The Sorrow of War, and most importantly of all, the writer he mentions more than any other, John Berger.

- What was most exciting was his way of looking for literary worth in all kinds of writing. His main quarrel with our dominant literary culture is its tendency to privilege the novel as the most important literary form, whereas Dyer finds it in letters and diaries, essays and travel books. Even writers who are best known for their novels, D.H. Lawrence for instance (another writer I would missed if not for Dyer's praise), wrote the work that Dyer loves the most in such 'extra-literary' forms.

- He's a romantic essentially. Interested in fragments and ruins, deserts and drugs. For all his repeated use of his own experience and the privileging of his writerly 'I', his oft-expressed impatience with the world around him, Dyer often seems to be most drawn to experiences which represent a temporary release from the self. Boredom is very important in his literary world (whether fictional and non-fictional), both for the stimulation it provides and for the relief from concern it occasions.

- I admit it, I envied him his life, or at least the way in which he represents it. I wanted to just like him, interested in everything, following my interests wherever they lead, living life on my own terms. That really is the promise what we might define as Bohemianism (a slightly archaic notion, as Dyer acknowledges in one piece) has long held for me. I may never have managed to live such a life, never even really tried to, but it is one that I have always envied. Goodness knows where I picked up the notion first, but it's a life which I know almost entirely through books rather than experience, and I'm old enough now to know that one shouldn't trust literary representations as guides for living. Or rather you can, the insights of the authors you love the most enrich your life and who you are as a person, but life continues on regardless.

- So why did I feel so dissatisfied with this newest collection? It's not just that I've come across some these pieces already; Geoff Dyer is a name I know to look out for in review sections now. There's just an awful lot of repetition. The pieces on photography feel like little more than off cuts from his great book on the subject The Ongoing Moment (admittedly those in the earlier book where the first things I'd read on the subject); the introductions from two of D.H. Lawrence's novels add little to his book on the author; he's a good close reader of texts, but the reviews included here feel more perfunctory than included in Anglo-English Attitudes.

- The clue may be in the title: Working the room. It comes from a sentence by Susan Sontag, and Dyer tells us in the book's introduction that Jonathan Letham, who had intended to use it for a book of his own, loaned it to him. Dyer may claim that he still writes only about what interests him, but to me here it feels more like a job of Work, as the title suggests.

- Despite his boasts of a variety of interests, what I actually found was a certain narrowness. Dyer has written about so much of this before, in Anglo-English Attitudes and elsewhere. The earlier collection had a review of a novel by Richard Ford, the newest book does too. And I still don't feel inclined to read anything by him.

- The inclusion of Ford leads me to another complaint: the excessive praise of American writing. Of course, we are entitled to allow our literary taste to run wherever it may. What irritates me about this, whenever English writers or critics praise American writing, is that it always seems to come at the expense at their own literary scene. It's not a new phenomenon either. Peter Ackroyd was making the case against such a attitude in the late 70s, in a piece included in The Collection, so it's clearly not a new notion, or unique to Geoff Dyer. We appear to have several generations of writers in this country who instinctively dismiss English (and it is always English) writing. Perhaps we could see it as a literary equivalent of the famous stereotypical English self-deprecation, but it's clearly more than that. It's a reaction against a dominent English literary culture, a reaction which seems to be largely derived from arguments about class.

- Geoff Dyer though, tries to justify his literary preference through an attention to language. Here he is from that first review of Richard Ford:

Lucky American writers for whom the dominant narrative voice of literature so close to the lives of the people within the narrative!...Think of the hoops James Kelman has had to wedge himself through to close the gap between narrative and dialogue; then think of Ford and that all-accommodating, middle-of-the-road that is equally at home either side of inverted commas.

'Richard Ford'

Here he is again, comparing the particular qualities of American and English journalism written about the Iraq War:

...American journalists writing about the US military are the beneficiaries of the all-round flexibility of and versatility of American English...Officers and non-coms share a common idiom which is varied and animated by the racial and cultural make up of the army.

'The Moral Art of War'

Well, perhaps. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if the British army were class ridden, as he claims. It's interesting that Dyer, who - like most English people - is easily able to discern class within British society, seems to elide it when he looks at American writing. Ford's narrative voice for example is surely that of a middle-class white man, which is fine if that's the subject of his work, but it's still a voice which excludes as much as it includes. I recently read one of Walter Mosely's Easy Rawlins novels. What's fantastic about Mosely's writing is the way it embodies black American speech (on either side of the inverted commas!), a language that is clearly distinct from the speech of the white world with which Rawlins repeatedly comes into contact. I'm suspicious of that 'all-encompassing'.

- Nor do I think it would be that difficult to find English writing which embodies speech just as effectively. I made just that point on this blog a while back when I described J.L. Carr's What Hetty Did in just such terms, and I had Dyer's argument in mind when I wrote that. I just think that Dyer has been looking in the wrong places, owing to his own prejudices. I doubt he's read Walter Mosely either, since he seems to be deaf to the attractions of genre. Nor is he interested in historical fiction (unless it's about a the World War I or the war in Vietnam), because Dyer's romanticism is centred on modernity, rather than any real interest in the past much before the late 19th century. But it's in the genre of historical fiction where a lot of interesting English writing has appeared in the last few decades. Or else in, perhaps - for want of a better term - the middlebrow novel, which interestingly some scholars now seem to be in the process of attempting to rescue from dismissal and snobbery. Or else in what still passes as the avant-grade. The point is that 'literature' for Geoff Dyer, seems to reside only within a rather narrow category of 'fine writing'.

- As the title of my blog probably indicates, I'm not so dismissive of the literature produced by this country. I'm not dismissing American literature here, since there is plenty I've enjoyed. I have a felling that the king of American writing I first encountered was very different from what Dyer did. If he or anyone else prefers American literature over English, I'm not going to say that they're wrong, or rather, I will respect their right to their opinion, but I am suspicious of the arguments I've seen which are used to bolster such claims.

- In contrast Anglo-English Attitudes, where the least interesting pieces are the last few, largely autobiographical pieces, Working the Room works the other way around. The most interesting pieces are the more personal ones, where Dyer reflects on being an only child and on what he seems to regard as the most important period of his life, where he enjoyed an idle existence for a few years after finishing university, living on the dole, reading critical theory and enjoying himself. He's frequently written about that time, even fictionalised it in The Colour of Memory, a book I love a great deal. The dissatisfaction which he describes as being almost the inevitable consequence of enjoying himself so much when he was younger feels like it could have been the outcome he desired all along. We're back to that slightly archaic notion of Bohemianism, a longing which I definitely share with him. He managed to live that life for a few years, and has arguably carried on doing just that, whereas I have only ever looked on with envy.

- I find I just don't envy him his life any more. This isn't a moral disapproval of the way in which Geoff Dyer describes his enjoyment of his early 20s. I largely agree with him: it does sound like an exemplary way to spend your early 20s. Although it's certainly not the only exemplary way, and it's certainly not the way I spent mine. I'm merely registering a change within myself here, something that I seem to be doing a lot of at the moment.

 ...I realise it was familiar to me back then, that the taste of ashes in the mouth was as much a generalised premonition as it was a particular reaction... Destiny, I think, is not what lies in store for you; it's what is already stored up inside you...

'On the Roof'