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:
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:
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.”
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:
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.