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.”
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith (2000) · 448pages · Contemporary / Postcolonial · 4 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 confidenc...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: Variable — shifts from Dickensian omniscient comedy to interior stream, from colloquial British-Asian to academic parody, often within a single paragraph
Narrator: Smith employs a Dickensian omniscient narrator who is also clearly a young British woman who grew up in multicultural...
Figurative Language: High
Historical Context
1970s–1990s Britain — postcolonial immigration, Thatcherism, rise of British multiculturalism, post-9/11 anxiety (anticipated): White Teeth is set at the end of the twentieth century and is partly an accounting of what that century made. The British Empire imported people; those people made Britain; Britain is still arguing...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Smith opens with Archie's botched suicide stopped by a Halal butcher who wants his parking space. What is she arguing, in the first two pages, about how history works?
- Samad sends Magid to Bangladesh to be raised 'properly Muslim' and gets back an Anglophile scientist. He keeps Millat to 'guide' him and produces a radical Islamist. What is Smith saying about the limits of parental intention?
- Millat's radicalization draws on Scarface, hip-hop, and Western pop culture at least as much as it draws on the Quran. What is Smith arguing about the origins of modern radicalism?
- Joyce Chalfen treats Millat as a fascinating cultural project. She means well. Why does the novel present her warmth as a form of harm?
- Irie Jones straightens her hair and burns her scalp. Smith writes this scene as simultaneously funny and devastating. How does she hold both registers at once, and what is she arguing about the body as a site of identity?
Notable Quotes
“It wasn't the people who owned the good stuff, it was the people who knew how to use it.”
“He had done nothing, something, nothing, and now he had this woman, this Clara, and he didn't know what any of it meant.”
“He wished, not for the first time, that he lived in an era that was less concerned with what you are and more with who you are.”
Why Read This
Because the question the novel asks — can you ever escape where you came from? — is the question every first-generation and second-generation student is living. White Teeth takes the experience of being between cultures and makes it literature ins...