My friend Brandon commented below that Smith shows "blatant contempt for every character except the one who is clearly based on the author." While I understand where he's coming from, I don't think it's contempt per se.
I mean it in the sense that the territory she stands on-that her narrator in White Teeth stands on-is one whose boundaries are staked out in terms of what she is not.
I don't mean this in the Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Jon Stewart sense. However, it's in terms of these personalities that I feel she makes her biggest misstep. Her cast of characters is varied and nearly every one of them comes off as a fully flesh and blood human being. She has a serious ear for dialogue and accent, she knows how to manage the flow and pacing of a story, and she's quite skilled at employing large concepts (genetic manipulation, immigrant psychology, the concept of history itself) both as fact and as metaphor. (Samad, in particular, reminds me quite a bit of Fury's Malik Solanka.) It reminds me very much of the freeflowing histories written by Marquez and Allende, as well as Salman Rushdie's strange little one-off treatise on cultural alienation, Fury. White Teeth is an expansive, detailed, and beautifully written attempt to encapsulate the social chaos that blossoms at the bridging of generational, national and sexual mindsets. Set against London’s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal.
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