White Teeth
Zadie Smith (2000)
“A riotously funny, heartbreaking novel about two families, three generations, and the question of whether any of us can ever escape where we came from.”
At a Glance
Beginning on New Year's Day 1975 with a botched suicide attempt by Archie Jones, White Teeth follows two London families across three generations: the white working-class Joneses and the Bangladeshi Iqbals. Their friendship — rooted in a wartime bond between Archie and Samad Iqbal — ripples forward through their children, Irie Jones and the Iqbal twins Magid and Millat, to a climactic confrontation at a science demonstration in 1999. Smith uses these two families to interrogate what it means to belong in multicultural Britain, whether history can be escaped, and whether the roots we're born into define us forever.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
White Teeth was the defining British novel of 2000 — the moment when contemporary multicultural Britain saw itself reflected in serious literary fiction for the first time. Smith was twenty-four, mixed-race, writing about Bangladeshi and Jamaican families in North London with Dickensian confidence. It announced both a new voice and a new subject for British fiction.
Diction Profile
Variable — shifts from Dickensian omniscient comedy to interior stream, from colloquial British-Asian to academic parody, often within a single paragraph
High