How White Teeth brushes off the charge of ‘hysterical realism’
White Teeth is not only a publishing phenomenon and a historical record of British life before the new millennium, it also has a curious literary significance. When Zadie Smith’s debut was first published in 2000, it was taken to symbolise a growing trend for bulging novels, and a style of writing that the critic James Wood memorably characterised as “hysterical realism”. He didn’t much like it. A genre was “hardening”, said Wood, in which “stories and substories sprout on every page”. His landmark piece of criticism named White Teeth as part of a movement that included Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Don Delillo’s Underworld and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
But, 20 years later, if anything’s hardened it’s the status of those books as stone-cold classics. You could be forgiven for wondering what Wood’s problem was.
There’s plenty more in his analysis that also now seems strange. “Familial resemblances are asserting themselves,” he writes, “and a parent can be named: he is Dickens.” Wood suggests that this is a problem:
I’d say an even more obvious reason for the popularity of Dickens among this talented bunch is that he is among the greatest authors ever to write in English.
Wood goes on to complain that Smith’s debut is no match for Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, “a beautiful novel written by a writer only a year older than Zadie Smith”. He might be right – but it’s telling that he had to cast back to a novel written in 1901 by one of the 20th century’s greatest geniuses to make his case. By that measure, almost everyone must surely fail.
Nitpicking over Wood’s essay is as reductive and unfair as his own over White Teeth. I could just as easily highlight his very fine writing and incisive comment. Take his hilarious summary of the novel:
There are some tremendous putdowns:
Wood is also careful to point out how well Smith can write and he’s generously fulsome about her obvious talent. There’s truth in his central proposition that novels such as White Teeth and even the mighty Underworld are somehow “evasive” of reality. There’s no arguing that they don’t give us a straight take, that their characters aren’t always realistic. But reading White Teeth now, in a time when reality itself often seems malleable, when everything feels stranger than fiction, when politicians feel as disconnected from the normal realm of humanity as any of Smith’s caricatures, it is hard to get worked up about novelists bending the rules of probability. It even feels as if they were on to something.
The last time anyone had to worry about “hysterical realism” was when Wood wrote his essay. There were one or two comparably hefty volumes that came out after White Teeth – Dave Eggers’ digressive A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius that same year, while the ocean liner of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections loomed into view in 2001. A couple of years later, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane was frequently compared to Smith’s debut. But I’d struggle to name many others. It’s tempting to argue that White Teeth marks the point where that wave started to recede. At the very least, its exuberance, excess and imagination make it feel like something from another age – and that only adds to its fascination.