Zadie Smith: White Teeth

Penguin

$24.95

Review: Penelope Bieder*

In her last year at Cambridge, a year filled with glittering prizes, Zadie Smith was also busy writing her first novel. She finished it at the age of 23 and just months later was dealing with an $800,000, two-novel contract from Penguin.

A literary marketer's dream, Smith, now 25, is the London-born and raised daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father, but it's not for nothing that Salman Rushdie writes on White Teeth's cover: "An astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious ... it has bite." Hollywood is hounding her for the film rights, the BBC is begging and Zadie still lives at home with Mum in Willesden, although she is thinking of going flatting up the road.

She reviewed White Teeth herself for the literary magazine Butterfly: "This kind of precocity in so young a writer has one half of the audience standing to applaud and the other half wishing, as with child performers of the past (Shirley Temple et al), she would just stay still and shut up.

"White Teeth is the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year-old."

No reviewer could be so sharp, as this is a wonderful book, hilarious, a roller-coaster ride following three London families as they struggle to discover what it means to be English.

Archie Jones, a blue-collar Englishman, marries Clara, a black Jamaican immigrant, and Samad Iqbal, a Bangladeshi Muslim, submits to an arranged marriage to Alsana. Samad and Archie have become unlikely lifelong friends after serving in the same British Army tank stranded in Romania in the dying weeks of the Second World War.

Twin sons of Samad (Millat and Magid) and Archie's daughter (Irie) are all born in England, but are presumed to be foreigners because of their skin colour.

Magid, who is sent back to Bangladesh as a pre-adolescent, becomes more English than the English while his twin brother Millat stays home and is caught up in an extreme Islam activist group whose acronym is Kevin.

The third family arrive on the scene halfway through the book - the chaotic, but definitely middle-class Chalfens. Joyce writes intellectual gardening books, Marcus is a scientist with an assortment of mice.

Smith's wonderful and witty migrant stories become appropriately overlaid by scientific discussions of transmutation and genetic engineering. There is brilliant imagery surrounding the human cross-pollination between old worlds and new.

Smith's way with words is spectacular and arresting. Archie is in "a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood." Alsana says: "But I cannot be worrying-worrying all the time about the truth. I have to worry about the truth that can be lived with. And that is the difference between losing your marbles drinking the salty sea, or swallowing the stuff from streams."

Or listen to this: "You blockhead; they are not wanting this, they are not willing it - they are just involved, see? They walk IN and they get trapped between the revolving doors of those two v's. Involved. The years pass, and the mess accumulates and here we are."

There is such assurance in all these colourful characters, no matter what their ages or experiences, unusual in a first novel.

This is a big book in every way, launching an illustrious literary career for Smith.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.