White Teeth by Zadie Smith

It isn’t often that I come across a “literary” novel peopled with characters who are almost universally likable and believable.  Such is the case with Zadie Smith's novel, White Teeth.  It isn’t so much that I find each person admirable, nor are their choices and resulting actions always on the up and up.  It’s more that these characters, well-written and compelling, become, by the fullness of the story’s climax,  like semi-close relatives;  you don’t necessarily respect their decisions, but you get them, you understand their behavior, even if you wouldn’t particularly want to have them over for dinner more than twice a year.

The novel opens upon the scene of one Archie Jones’s suicide attempt, on a side street of London, circa 1975.  Archie had just gone through a particularly disheartening divorce (all the more so because, rather than in spite of the fact, the marriage was never a happy one). Before taking his final polluted breath courtesy of a misappropriated Hoover hose, Archie is saved by a reluctant rescuer, Mo Hussein-Ishmael, a Halal butcher whose delivery dock was blocked in a timely (for Archie that is) fashion by Archie’s unlikely death machine.  Grateful for his reprieve, reminiscent and hopeful, Archie recalls his time spent in the service during World War II where we are introduced to Samad Iqbal, Archie’s battle buddy and life-long friend.

Upon being introduced to these two men, one pompous, one self-effacing, we are then well-met by their wives, both decades younger than their husbands.  The first to make the reader’s acquaintance is Clara, Archie’s Jamaican teenage bride. Desperate to flee an oppressive Jehovah's Witness mother, and an increasingly fractious boyfriend, she gravitates towards a middle-aged Archie and the improbable dream of escape. Next is Samad’s wife, Alsana, the product of a traditional Bengali arrangement in which Samad waited many years for the birth of his betrothed, a fiery pessimist, both acclimating and rebelling within a strange marriage, in a strange land.

The novel follows these incongruous friends and their equally odd domestic pairings, as they make and raise families in a time of unsettling changes in morality, media, and technical advancement.  Their tale measures up well in equal parts for both humor, and a deep vein of thought-provoking societal observations. I recommend this to fans of character-driven novels, and for those with a taste for something different, yet familiar all the same.

Jennifer Wilson