Zadie Smith’s White Teeth has come out of the hat and will be the subject of July’s reading group. Which feels like a great thing for all sorts of reasons – not least that this year marks the 20th anniversary of this landmark in British literature.
Even before White Teeth was published at the start of 2000, Zadie Smith was a sensation. Just 24 and brilliantly clever, her debut novel was rumoured to have sold for around £250,000 on the basis of an 80-page extract. Unusually in publishing, White Teeth actually repaid the big money up front. It sold big and fast and people loved it. It was a Guardian first book award winner. It won the James Tait Black memorial prize, the Whitbread book award, and the Betty Trask award. “Believe the hype,” said The Times. The Telegraph said it was “outstanding”. The Financial Times declared it “extraordinarily accomplished”. The Independent heard “a great big blast of a novel.” When it arrived in the US, critics’ doyenne Michiko Kakutani declared it “a novel that announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer” in the New York Times.
Meanwhile, in a weighty review in the Observer, Caryl Phillips said that the novel was “all it was cracked up to be”:
The ‘mongrel’ nation that is Britain is still struggling to find a way to stare into the mirror and accept the ebb and flow of history that has produced this fortuitously diverse condition and its concomitant pain … Smith’s first novel is an audaciously assured contribution to this process of staring into the mirror. Her narrator is deeply self-conscious, so much so that one can almost hear the crisp echo of Salman Rushdie’s footsteps. However, her wit, her breadth of vision and her ambition are of her own making. The plot is rich, at times dizzyingly so, but White Teeth squares up to the two questions which gnaw at the very roots of our modern condition: Who are we? Why are we here?
There was also some backlash. In the New Republic, James Wood called White Teeth “a perpetual-motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity”:
Smith’s novel features, among other things: a terrorist Islamic group based in north London with a silly acronym (kevin), an animal-rights group called fate, a Jewish scientist who is genetically engineering a mouse, a woman born during an earthquake in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1907; a group of Jehovah’s Witnesses who think that the world is ending on December 31, 1992; and twins, one in Bangladesh and one in London, who both break their noses at about the same time.
Wood saw an excess of storytelling. “This is not magical realism,” he complained. “It is hysterical realism.” That term has stuck around – but so too has White Teeth. Twenty years after it first arrived, I think it’s an established modern classic. No list of the best novels of recent times is complete without it. More to the point, people are still buying it, reading and enjoying it. I’m looking forward to joining their number. I can’t wait to get stuck in. I hope you’ll join me.
As an added inducement, we have five copies of White Teeth to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy, please”, along with a nice, constructive thought in the comments. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to post, email the lovely people on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username so they can track you down.
And one more thing! We had a reader request for a printable list of the fantastic nominations we received last week. So here it is. There are a lot of really good books on there, so it should come in very useful. And if you do read any of them, please report back with recommendations on our weekly Tips, links and suggestions pages.
