I set myself the task for 2024 of reading and then writing about 25 pieces of London fiction I haven’t read before. This is number 22 in the series.
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Almost a quarter of a century has passed since Zadie Smith’s novel about two World War II-connected, pre-millennium north west London families of kaleidoscopic variety emerged amid the Great National Anxiety about Britishness and multiculturalism, and the world as true born Englishmen knew it – or thought they did – falling apart.
White Teeth was showered in awards and with praise from everywhere from the Guardian to the Daily Telegraph. “Its characters embrace Jehovah’s Witnesses, halal butchers, eugenicists, animal-rights activists and a group of Muslim militants who labour under the unfortunate acronym KEVIN,” wrote one appreciative reviewer, summing up its breadth and disinhibition.
For instance, lovesick, painfully self-conscious teenager Irie goes for a bold hair make-over:
“Irie looked lost, standing in the middle of the shop, clutching her chub. The woman took pity, swallowed her gum and looked Irie up and down; she looked more sympathetic as she noted Irie’s cocoa complexion, the light eyes.
‘Jackie.’
‘Irie.’
‘Pale, sir. Freckles ‘an every ting. You Mexican?’
‘No.’
‘Arab?’
‘Half Jamaican, Half English.’
‘Half-caste,’ Jackie explained, patiently. ‘Your mum white?’
‘Dad.’
Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘Usually de udder way roun'”
Now there’s candour for you, about candid talk not every writer would transfer from the salon to the page. Smith doesn’t tiptoe around. She is fizzingly direct about touchy stuff like appearances, attraction and pecking order interactions. Her other lead adolescent is Millat, insubordinate son of Muslims:
“Aged twelve, Millat went out looking for it, and though Willesden Green is no Bronx, no South Central, he found a little, he found enough. He was arsey and mouthy, he had his fierce good looks squashed tightly inside him like a jack-in-a-box set to spring aged thirteen, at which point he graduated from leader of zit-faced boys to leader of women. The Pied Piper of Willesden Green, smitten girls trailing behind him, tongues out, breasts pert, falling into pools of heartbreak.”
Her older Londoners are every bit as dazzlingly flawed, including Millat’s dad, a waiter who contracts an absurd case of fundamentalism, and his erstwhile British Army comrade-in-arms, who in marrying Irie’s mother, at that point less than half his age, takes her away from the life of hippy uselessness in which she had found refuge from a childhood of doorstep evangelism. Then we have the preposterously liberal Chalfen household, intellectuals lacking basic forms of intelligence. Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall is coming down, The Satanic Verses is being burned and, you know, so on.
None of Smith’s characters are dull. And her depiction of what had perhaps already been packaged for mainstream consumption as London’s “vibrant diversity” is served up warts-and-all, almost unnervingly free of sentiment and idealisation. White Teeth’s London world was as stark as it was preposterous as its creation was precocious, 540 pages of dashing originality exploding from a 25-year-old.
Lurking within me I detect nostalgia. It might be thoroughly misplaced, a sign of advancing years and too little reading of more recent fiction exploring similar themes. But I cannot deny its presence – a feeling that the culture wars have nourished an introversion, a sententiousness and a defensiveness that would disapprove of the freedom with which Smith expressed herself, and wish to curb the liberty with which she portrayed the Londoners of the decades before the 2000s. I hope I’m wrong. And if I’m right, I hope I won’t be for long.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, editor and publisher of On London. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here, here or here. Subscribe to his Substack too.