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!

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

I’ll come to the actual novel in a moment. Before I do, I’d like to take a look at the two covers above. Which of the two do you prefer? If it’s the one on the right, then I’m afraid that we shall have to agree to disagree. It’s a shame I couldn’t find a clearer image online, but actually, I suppose it’s not too bad, part of a uniform set of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels reissued a few years ago. Certainly, I like it more than the cover of The Blue Flower, which is a horrible digital image. This at least is an image of something which is actually real, even it misrepresents the contents on sale in the shop of the book’s title, which are modern hard and paperbacks from the 1950s. These look like Victorian books, in rather poor condition too from the looks of the spines. Paperbacks, of course, don’t convey the sense of knowledge and timelessness that we get from an old decaying hardback. What I really dislike about the most recent editions is the wide expanse of blank space with which they frame their single images. The cover from the earlier edition (the edition I’m thankful to say mine was) presumably comes from a time when book publishers routinely put works of art on the covers of their books. A practice which now seems confined to lines of classic fiction. Although even there, Vintage appear to have broken with convention.

The cover here, a detail from the painting Cicero Reading, makes some of the same associations as the later image. It’s not a dogeared paperback with a cracked spine he’s reading. It’s also an image of antiquity, both the Classical past of the real Cicero and the Italian Renaissance when that past was rediscovered and the painting from which the detail comes. It conveys powerfully a sense of leisure and wealth. Not wealth in the sense of financial wealth, although of course that is present, and is often the only thing which permits a person to enjoy the leisure depicted, but also a sense of cultural wealth. The wealth that comes from being able to appreciate art and literature, to discriminate, to possess taste. So often in the humanist culture which has developed since the European Renaissance we seem to frame this inheritance explicitly in terms derived from the culture in the Italian states in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

I think I’ve mentioned covers once or twice before on this blog. And no doubt I shall continue to do so. Clearly, it goes without saying that anyone who doesn’t judge a book by its cover, for whom that isn’t part of their response to a book, is missing out, is something of a fool. And this cover does resonate with some of the themes of this short novel, since the bookshop and the values it represents is ultimately driven out of the East Anglian village of Hardborough, to be replaced by an Arts Centre.

The first of Penelope Fitzgerald’s books I read was The Blue Flower, her last. I can't improve on A.S. Byatt's blurb, ‘A masterpiece. How does she do it?’ Since then I’ve worked my way back through the other historical novels that make up the second half of her fiction writing career, and now I’m starting on the novels written out of her autobiographical experiences. No doubt I shall end with her very first book, The Golden Child, before moving onto the biographies. Although this isn’t, perhaps, explicitly an historical fiction then, it still feels very clearly set in its historical moment of 1959. Early on there’s even a rather pompous bank manager who opines about the, ‘vastly different world which the 1960s may have in store for us.’ More subtly there are references to the devastating floods of 1953 which the official post war memory supposedly blotted out, a marvellous evocation of children receiving their 11-plus results in which we are suddenly privy to what success or failure is going to mean to an entire generation once their lives have played out, and of course the publication of Lolita is an important plot point. Even more subtly than that, there’s possibly even a hint of the way in which the whole post-war project failed in the political machinations which ultimately drive out Florence Green. Like Florence, Mrs Gammart is an incomer to the village of Hardborough, but also a meddler, someone who likes to impose her views on others, and the closest the novel has to a villain.

As ever with Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing there’s an elusiveness to it, so much packed into such a short space. You have to keep your wits about you, else you’ll miss important action, since it’s often elided, or occurs between scenes. And she has a wonderful ability to sum up a character and their history in only a single line, whilst still somehow respecting a sense of the mysteriousness of human beings. On Florence Green, we’re memorably told on the first page, ‘She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to self-preservation.’ It generalises from the specificity of the character in a way which is almost aphoristic. I particularly liked the line about Mr. Brandish, the aged aristocratic figure whom the sly narrative voice informs us in some way is Hardborough through his aristocratic and family connections – the fact that as far as the rest of the village is concerned, he’s always been there – and whom Florence somehow befriends despite their only meeting the once: ‘Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity’, which captures a certain lost aristocratic grandeur. Of course, ultimately that was displaced by the Mrs. Gammarts of the world.

a masterpiece...

...because I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong idea about how good this book is.

I have a vague memory of hearing that Lorna Sage won the Whitbread prize for autobiography for her memoir Bad Blood, probably when the paperback came out later that year. No doubt the story attracted more attention since she died only a week after it won. I see also that a few years later there a posthumous publication of her selected journalism, an honour I think can have been accorded to few academics who aren't Frank Kermode. No doubt her publisher was attempting to feed the interest generated by that memoir for a writer whose other writings were chiefly academic.

I shouldn't sound so snarky. This really is one of the finest books I've read in some time. I'm fairly sure I remember encountering her Women in the House of Fiction during my undergraduate degree. I don't think that will have been the reason why my mother bought her memoir though. In fact, I'm not sure if she ever read it. I've been noticing it on her shelves for a while now.

Almost the first thing which attracted me was brief excerpted the reviews just inside the front cover. They're almost as fascinating as memoir they advertise, and perversely perhaps, it's a few of these reviews I want to address here.

An unnamed writer from the Guardian sententiously opines "Nothing else I have read destroys so successfully the fantasy of the family as a safe place to be...", a sentiment which, as someone who grew up in what was largely a very happy family I can't help but find rather insulting. Of course we had our difficulties, and of course I'm not so naive as to believe that all families are happy or 'safe'. I know several people whose experiences put the lie to that. But this is as insulting a prejudice as the Daily Mail assumption that all families are sacrosanct and special. You can't make such a sweeping a generalisation about an cultural institution which exists in so many different forms, and which everyone belongs to in some way or another. And it's not really the story that Lorna Sage tells. She describes her difficult relationships with her parents and grandparents with scrupulous clarity, but what also comes through is a love for these eccentric individuals. Whatever else they were, they were also her family, and she is equally conscious of what she has inherited from them. There seems very little bitterness, something a few of the other reviewers comment on, although Marina Warner also feels happy to label it a picture of a 'childhood hell'. That 'Bad Blood' of the title seems like a source of pride and creative energy as much as it might be intended as a badge of shame.

Rachel Cusk, writing for the Evening Standard, voices another unexamined prejudice when she claims 'This "memoir" has all the qualities of fiction'. Which is, quite clearly, also rubbish. The qualities it possesses are those of any stunningly written book, but these are not qualities which are the sole purview of fiction. There are a great many works of art found within non-fiction forms. Appropriating a book like this to the category of 'fiction' with Rachel Cusk's scare quotes makes a mockery of literary categories and privilages fiction in a way which is more than a little silly.

More silliness comes from Jonathan Raban, himself responsible for more than a few works of art within non-fictional categories, who wants to make a monument out of Lorna Sage's book: 'What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever been on the run'. It's interesting to think about this quote in the context of recent remarks by the Midsommer Murders producer who claimed that his show was 'the last bastion of Englishness'. The assumption in both cases is that there is a single, easily reducible 'England' that we can all agree on. On the contrary, I think that Englishness, like any national identity, is multiple, and no, that's not just because I'm an academic and 'multiple' identities is a fashionable term. It could be a fashionable term for all I know, but fashionabe or not it just seems to me to be self evidently true. The North is distinct from the South. Town is different from country. London is different from York. The Lake District is distinct from the Cotswolds, which is distinct from the Yorkshire Moors, which are distinct from the East Anglian Fens. Yet all of these landscapes and places are identifiably English to me.

At least Jonathan Raban doesn't try to claim that it is something which should be protected in some way. And Lorna Sage is exceptional at placing her story in its historical context. Appropriately for the literary critic she was, her childhood association with a local farmer leads to a subtle disquistion on Hardy and the farming life and culture which was (is) perenially in decline. Her story is one of post war social mobility, and it doesn't stop at its end, when she acknowledges that it was her daughter who became the future in the 60s. This is a narrative I've heard before, in autobiographical writings from Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt, Alan Bennett, Derek Jarman and others. I imagine that might be what attracted my Mum to it, because it's even, just about, my parents' story. They were born later, in 1950 and 51, and reached university at the tail end of the 60s, but I still feel theirs is a part of that same post war narrative. But each story is distinct, belonging to that person alone. If books were Lorna Sage's passport out of her family and social environment, as Marina Warner's excerpted review suggests, then it was a passport freely given to her in childhood. The changes British culture was undergoing at that point allowed a very clever girl to succeed where previously she might not have done, which is not to deny her agency in her own narrative. It's just to acknowledge, yet again, that we make our own history, but not in the circumstances of our choosing.

It's also a narrative that I feel has now become much harder to occur. For a variety of reasons, education no longer seems to carry the authority it once did. Everything is much more utilitarian now, and many of the post war gains have been eroded over the last 30 years. It's one of the reasons I find this period of British history so fascinating. It was far from a perfect time, because no time is perfect, but there was something positive in the culture then (although I would struggle to articulate just what precisely that is) which I wish hadn't been so willfully discarded.