Collideoscope

One of the things I found out about Smith via ye olde Google was that she authored this novel when she was only 24! Imagine if I, a year earlier, had burst onto the international writing scene. Okay, maybe not, lol, but I felt a kinship with her as I read it because she would have been my contemporary at the time and I identified with her voice. It was like I was reading a novel written by an intelligent, savvy, bitingly funny best friend.

The story begins in North London as Archie Jones, one of the main characters, is inhaling carbon monoxide through a hose stuffed into his idling car's tailpipe. After he's given another chance at life through a coincidental circumstance, the reader, guided by a whimsical, almost hyperactive narrative voice, gets an understanding of how Archie, his Jamaican second wife Clara, and his Bengali best friend Samad and family arrive at their respective destinations.

We get a taste of the feelings of alienation and of wanting to belong, yet a strong sense of cultural pride that some immigrants experience. We get a taste of the identity crises of youth (Animal rights activist? Raggastani hoodlum? Islamic fundamentalist?) thrown into a multicultural milieu. Smith isn't didactic. She raises a lot of questions that she doesn't explicitly answer: What impact does (or should) history have on our present? What should be our response to societal and cultural change? Are religion and science at odds, or are they two sides of the same coin?

White Teeth is a peculiar title of a novel. But "white teeth" is the novel's unique motif. Though Smith takes us from the shores of the Jamaican isle to the Indian continent, to a black hair salon to a corner of an Irish pub in London, "white teeth" is the one thing constant in the smiles, smirks and grimaces of all.