Thursday, December 5, 2019

Digested read / White Teeth by Zadie Smith

DIGESTED READ

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £12.99) digested in the style of the original in 400 words

Fri 28 Jan ‘00 02.56 GMT

Archie Jones is boring. If life is a beach, Archie is a pebble. If it's an ocean or a haystack, he's a raindrop or a needle respectively. But Life says "Yes" to Archie.

"We're not licenced for suicides around here. This place is halal. Kosher, understand?" says Archie's rescuer. Because the grubby north London borough where Archie lives is multicultural. It's a melting pot. It's eclectic. It's besieged with identity crises.

Even boring Archie indulges in a bit of ethnic diversity. Back from the brink, he marries the beautiful and exotic Clara from Lambeth (via Jamaica). He didn't love his first wife, but he loves Clara, who is tall, black and has a bosom that defies gravity. Clara is 30 years Archie's junior and marries him by accident after escaping a Jehovah Witness family and a pile of misplaced copies of the Watchtower .

Archie and Clara spawn Irie who is a nerd and therefore technically marginalised too. The object of Irie's undying love is the dashing Millat Iqbal, who, as an Islamic militant, has also staked out his post-colonial ground. As it turns out, Millat (and twin Magid)'s dad, Samad, is Archie's best mate.

Two families from different sides of the colonial fence whose lives intertwine on a daily basis. Very late 20th century. Very ordinary. Because multiculturalism is ordinary. And in north London boroughs such as this one, shit happens and people get on with their lives.

But Archie and Samad's - a Bengali Muslim and one-armed waiter - friendship goes deeper. They're wartime buddies who, naturally, have a shared secret. They were herded into the same tank and left to bond until peace was declared. And everyone knows wartime friendships are sacred. So when Samad moves to England on the back of the 1970s immigration wave, the two soon re-establish their immutable bond. And anyway, the Bangladeshi Iqbals "aren't those sorts of Indians", Archie reassures Clara.

Zadie Smith

So the Joneses and the Iqbals live happily in multicultural bliss until the second generation realise that ethnic ecleticism presents some serious issues. "Who are we? Where are we from?" they wonder. Then along come the Chalfens with their good genes and progressive ideas about DNA. The Chalfens are radical, progressive and liberal. They're Chalfenists with Chalfenesque ideas and a cloned mouse called FutureMouse. More shit for the kids to deal with.

Magid is sent off to Bangladesh to become a good Muslim and returns as an atheist, anglophile intellectual, such is the topsy-turvy nature of this strange boundary-less world. He thinks the FutureMouse is cool. Millat confuses the glamour of American gangsters with the darker edge of fundamentalism. Extremism looms. Racism is rife. Then there's gender - Irie is fat and obsessive.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. Identity. Destiny. New Year's Eve 1992 and the FutureMouse is unveiled. Family and belonging. It's all so confusing. But then it's a wicked lie that "the past is always tense and the future, perfect", ponders Archie.

• And if you really are pressed: The digested read, digested The Joneses and the Iqbals are different yet similar. Post-colonial Britain is confusing. Identity, race, gender and genetics are serious issues. But that doesn't make ordinary people serious - they just get on with their lives.

THE GUARDIAN