How White Teeth transcends its many flaws
Famously, Zadie Smith sold White Teeth for £250,000 on the back of an 80-page-extract. She once told the story on the BBC’s World Book Club:
“I’d written what was meant to be a short story – which was kind of the first two chapters. I got a letter from this publisher who’d read a short story of mine in an Oxbridge collection of short fiction … He said have you got anything longer and I sent him what I had of this long story and that was that … And the scary thing was then being told I had to finish it and write this novel.”
Publishers are often criticised for being risk-averse, but that sounds like one hell of a risk to me. I’m also curious what was in her extract. Not least because the plot of White Teeth is tangled, meandering and very silly.
That’s not a criticism. White Teeth is a 500-page baggy monster and plenty of its considerable reading pleasure comes from the easy way it ranges over time and space. I wonder if Smith knew then how she would end the novel – with (spoilers):
Two different sets of hapless wannabe terrorist organisations (several of whose leading members are stoned) descending on a New Year’s Eve launch party for a new kind of genetically modified mouse. Every other main character in the book is also conveniently gathered there (or singing hymns outside). There’s a surprise reveal about a suspected Nazi war criminal. Someone accidentally gets shot in the leg. The “rebel” mouse gives a “smug look” and escapes.
Ridiculous. But don’t take it from me. Take it from Smith, who has described the end of White Teeth as “calamitous”. As always, she’s worth quoting in full:
“I had come to realise that my White Teeth was about 100 pages too long and suffered from a calamitous ending, dragging at the rear like all unnecessary tails. The truth is, it could do with some touching up. If it were a perfect piece of statuary, then no, one wouldn’t want anybody’s grubby fingers upon it. But it’s not, it’s more like a fat, messy kid who needs help.”
Smith also said, soon after the book came out: “When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.”
Related: White Teeth seemed fresh and hopeful in 2000 – how does it read now?
I’m not going to question criticisms from such an authority. But reading a book by a Simpsons script editor who’s been in a cult and just discovered an academic obsessed with sex and power sounds like a pretty fascinating experience, and that is what White Teeth is. It would have been our loss if Smith’s editor Simon Prosser had decided against that stonking advance. And that’s before mentioning the awards, the 2m-plus sales and the ecstatic reviews that greeted the book when it came out. It’s still astonishing to read the opening paragraph in Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review:
“White Teeth by the young British writer Zadie Smith is not one of your typical small, semi-autobiographical first novels. It’s a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie with a nod to indie movies like My Beautiful Laundrette, a novel that’s not afraid to tackle large, unwieldy themes. It’s a novel that announces the debut of a preternaturally gifted new writer – a writer who at the age of 24 demonstrates both an instinctive storytelling talent and a fully fashioned voice that’s street-smart and learned, sassy and philosophical all at the same time.”
Imagine being 24 and compared to Dickens! Of course, White Teeth is a far from perfect novel. Smith, who has been a fiercer critic of her own book than Kakutani, has said that she can’t read White Teeth without “cringing” thanks to its flaws in characterisation, to its tendency to bulk out the narrative with essays about history and fundamentalism, and that daft ending. But then again – and this is where all those comparisons to Dickens really kick in – Smith gets away with it. Partly because she writes beautiful, engaging sentences. Partly thanks to that indefinable storytelling magic that keeps you invested, in spite of everything. I may have thought that plenty of the plotting was preposterous, but I still wanted to stay with it until the end. And even that not-so-grand-finale also manages to be touching and funny, in spite of everything. The gamble paid off.
