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.

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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!