White Teeth was originally published in the year 2000 and is Zadie Smith’s first novel. It is a pretty impressive debut considering Smith was only 24 years old when it was published. It is a thick book that took me nearly two weeks to read, and it is Dickensian with a large cast of characters. It reads like a quaint 19th or early 20th century novel even though it is set in the late 20th century. White Teeth is broadly about the immigrant experience in western culture. It took a bit for me to get into the story, but I ended up finding it to be an interesting and humorous read.

White Teeth is set in London, England and opens on January 1, 1975, when white, forty-something Englishman, Archie Jones, attempts to commit suicide after his divorce from his first wife. Archie is saved from death, and with a new lease on life, he marries a beautiful nineteen-year-old Jamaican immigrant by the name of Clara, who rather bizarrely has no upper teeth.

Archie’s best friend is a Bengali Muslim immigrant by the name of Samad Iqbal. They met during the second world war when they served in the same unit, and a dark secret has bonded them for life. Samad immigrated to England after the war and married Alsana through an arranged marriage. Samad and Alsana have twin sons, Magid and Millat. Samad is a waiter who is obsessed with his great-grandfather, a supposed hero during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Samad feels that western culture has corrupted his Muslim values as he spends a lot of time masturbating, and then having an affair with his kids’ music teacher. He decides that the solution to this corruption is to send his sons back to Bangladesh so that they can grown up to be proper Muslims, but he does not have enough money to send them both, so he basically kidnaps one of his children, Magid, and does not tell Alsana that he is sending Magid away until after he is already gone.

Archie and Clara have a daughter named Irie, who is in love with her friend Millat. Millat does not reciprocate her feelings and spends his time being a huge disappointment to his parents by drinking and smoking pot and sleeping with white girls, until he joins a militant Muslim fundamentalist brotherhood. Both Irie and Millat become involved with the Chalfens, a white, middleclass family of intellectuals who think they are liberal but are actually racist. The patriarch of the family, Marcus Chalfen, is a geneticist who is working on a “FutureMouse” project where he grows tumours inside of a mouse, which ends up becoming an important part of the story because of the controversary it creates with the different religious and social factions that the various characters are involved in.  

Now this barely scratches the surface of what is going on in White Teeth. It is quite the zany novel, and I feel like the third person narrator is taking the piss out of the characters. Unfortunately, some characters (such as Samad) get too many pages to delve into their idiosyncrasies, while I feel that Smith barely scratches the surface on other characters. I would have been more interested in reading from Clara’s perspective, but she practically disappears from the story after her and Archie’s marriage. And Archie ends up playing a pivotal role in the finale of the novel, but he becomes a background character while Samad takes center stage. Overall, though, I thought the character development was well done, even with Samad and Alsana crossing over into the realm of caricature.

I do not think White Teeth is a novel for everyone. I think if you like character-driven stories, you will find this novel interesting, but I would recommend going into White Teeth knowing that you do not need to take it too seriously.