Zadie Smith's White Teeth is a hilarious, well-written, overstuffed comic-book of a novel: episodic and picaresque, by turns heartbreaking and heartening. The plot is tortuous, the science absurd on which the climax hangs — but no matter. Smith's dizzy white-water ride of people and cultures carries one along quite briskly enough, thank you, without time to criticize or think about inconsistencies.

No need to even attempt to describe the events that take place in White Teeth; they're utterly unimportant. The melange of sub-societies — Jamaican and British and Bangladeshi-Moslem, analytic and religious and mystical-nihilist — come together with Smith's ear for dialect and mindset to make a tasty stew. Yes, the book could have been better. There's too much foul language, drugs, raunchiness, violence, coincidence, pain, and greasy food. The caricatures often push the characters offstage. The ending is over-the-top silly, an unnecessary exercise in knot-tying.

So what? It's the journey that counts: the rhythmic rattling of the train, the scenery scrolling by the window, the chatter of one's fellow passengers, and the helter-skelter chaos of arrival/departure that every station-stop throws the carriage into. Getting off at one's destination is anticlimactic. So is the conclusion of White Teeth.

TopicLiterature - 2003-08-25

(correlates: UncleBert, GoingSolo, MySpeciality, ...)