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New York Times Book Reviews
Editors' Choice
White Teeth by Zadie Smith. (Random House.)
2000

Here is a perfect John Rocker Christmas gift -- a sunny celebration of the mixed races multiplying out of control everywhere and shaping the future of the crowded world. In Zadie Smith's magnificent first novel they are found in a North London neighborhood teeming with immigrants from India, the Caribbean and Asia in various stages and generations of assimilation, along with spongy British liberals floating like leaves in the swirling winds of all this hopeful energy. The story is centered on members of two families, one British and one Bengali, all of whom are a bit ridiculous in their own ways, as are all the other characters who pop up in this raucous book. Smith uses the methods of satire, but "White Teeth" is not satire; Smith loves these people and makes us laugh with them more than at them. Their passion for belonging, while at the same time escaping the cultures their families are rooted in, could easily be reduced to ridicule or pathos. But here the conflicting impulses amount to a kind of civic virtue as these people pull together to remake England into a patchwork and pleasant land. Smith has been compared to Salman Rushdie, but her lightness and humility are all her own; her art is one of glances and smiles, not arm-wrestling. Above all, her ear is miraculously attuned to the voices of different races, generations and dispositions. There is no mediation here; they speak directly to us, with personal urgency.

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