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bedcarp 's review for:
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
everyone i know hates this book. goodreads and twitter mutuals, university friends, other literary types i've dated (the kind you walk around a bookstore with and together loudly, annoyingly point at a Universally Acclaimed Book to boldly denigrate it in front of the world), boomers who shake their hand at the prospect that this is the present state of "the canon" (though zadie smith would likely be the first to refute the linearity or singularity of such a concept), the avant-garde kids who wag their heads at the significantly shittier DFWisms sprinkled throughout the book's digressive passages, etc. the whirlwind of sheer fucking HATE this book inspires, the variety and colour of it, is rather beautiful in a way - a book as unrelentingly ironic and riotously many-tongued as white teeth could never have gone down any other way.
i like this book. not just because it's a rare instance of daring and ambition that contemporary literature (at least the new york times and guardian-approved kind) seems to lack in spades, but because on the most superficial level, the vision of london in white teeth feels distinctly faithful to the rhizomatic chaos of urban life. the seemingly infinite number of entry points and fractalising (or converging?) root systems everywhere - the sprawl of the tube, the crisscrossing of intersections, the monstrous entanglements of telephone wires. you can enter white teeth from any point, as a story about identity, about recurrence, about predestination and fate, about trauma, and realise that at some point, that there is no such thing as an isolated quality to life, that no story can ever be fully or neatly told without betraying the very subjects it has conjured into existence. (ed. note: finish tristram shandy soon)
white teeth, therefore, exists in a kind of paradox - it is simultaneously about the impossibility of establishing a start and end while being, quite literally, a novel that must start and end. the multicultural dream that smith holds dear is perhaps that as we relinquish the linear histories of place, we can also come to embody the mutability of our own pasts and carve out a start and end for our stories where fact recedes into faith - that we are not so much rootless as we are on some level radically free to first be, whether fundamentalists or horn-rimmedly post-racial, regardless of the extent to which our pasts shape us. all this is very utopic, and smith's realism does not arrive at that epiphany without a lengthy trial. systemic prejudices intertwined with personal trauma abound, and sometimes communities form out of defensive necessity. i appreciated the introduction of the annoying neoliberal middle-class family in the back half of the novel that ends up playing a major role in the novel's conclusion. smith seems to suggest that the fears associated with identity are not exclusive to race or the immigrant narrative but also pervade the loftier grounds of humanist rationality and free will.
i do have some small gripes with the novel (it's VERY close to a 4-star): smith's digressions often hover between insightful/funny and tediously overnarrated; the pervasive irony, while never cruel, can detract from moments where a healthy shot of pathos wouldn't hurt, and i do think some of the dozens of subplots could be excised, even in a novel devoted to excess. (with minimal spoilers, chapter 15 for example launches a major subplot which carries over into chapter 16 and then just... fades away?)
i like this book. not just because it's a rare instance of daring and ambition that contemporary literature (at least the new york times and guardian-approved kind) seems to lack in spades, but because on the most superficial level, the vision of london in white teeth feels distinctly faithful to the rhizomatic chaos of urban life. the seemingly infinite number of entry points and fractalising (or converging?) root systems everywhere - the sprawl of the tube, the crisscrossing of intersections, the monstrous entanglements of telephone wires. you can enter white teeth from any point, as a story about identity, about recurrence, about predestination and fate, about trauma, and realise that at some point, that there is no such thing as an isolated quality to life, that no story can ever be fully or neatly told without betraying the very subjects it has conjured into existence. (ed. note: finish tristram shandy soon)
white teeth, therefore, exists in a kind of paradox - it is simultaneously about the impossibility of establishing a start and end while being, quite literally, a novel that must start and end. the multicultural dream that smith holds dear is perhaps that as we relinquish the linear histories of place, we can also come to embody the mutability of our own pasts and carve out a start and end for our stories where fact recedes into faith - that we are not so much rootless as we are on some level radically free to first be, whether fundamentalists or horn-rimmedly post-racial, regardless of the extent to which our pasts shape us. all this is very utopic, and smith's realism does not arrive at that epiphany without a lengthy trial. systemic prejudices intertwined with personal trauma abound, and sometimes communities form out of defensive necessity. i appreciated the introduction of the annoying neoliberal middle-class family in the back half of the novel that ends up playing a major role in the novel's conclusion. smith seems to suggest that the fears associated with identity are not exclusive to race or the immigrant narrative but also pervade the loftier grounds of humanist rationality and free will.
i do have some small gripes with the novel (it's VERY close to a 4-star): smith's digressions often hover between insightful/funny and tediously overnarrated; the pervasive irony, while never cruel, can detract from moments where a healthy shot of pathos wouldn't hurt, and i do think some of the dozens of subplots could be excised, even in a novel devoted to excess. (with minimal spoilers, chapter 15 for example launches a major subplot which carries over into chapter 16 and then just... fades away?)