White Teeth : Zadie Smith

                                                        Image Credit: Blogs.NYU
Expectations and the burdens it places on us! Zadie Smith's White Teeth was among the most talked about novels of the past decade. Although I don't care much if a book is popular or not before I decide to read it, I made the erroneous judgement that White Teeth simply must be superb considering the rave critical reviews it received. Ouch ouch ouch. I could have as well have hit my head with a hammer; that would have been so much more pleasing than reading this monstrous over-hyped tome.

White Teeth - how do I describe it? Perhaps Zadie Smith is trying to portray the immigrant experience, perhaps she is trying to portray a few London families, their children, and the angst of living amidst changing times. I have no idea what she was trying, honestly. The book begins promisingly enough with Archie slumped over his car steering wheel, hoping to whoosh into the gentle heavens. He, unfortunately, does not die. Unfortunate, for the poor reader, that is. He bumps into Clara, a Jamaican who had her teeth smashed out in an accident when she was riding with her boyfriend, Ryan. Well, they get married. Archie's best friend is Samad Iqbal. They go back a long way when they were manning a tank in Europe during World War 2. Samad marries Alsana - and incidentally, Samad is Bangladeshi. Even recounting all this hurts!

As the book rambles, we are taken into Clara's childhood, her extremely religious mother, Hortense, and her experiences with Ryan, who turns even more religious than Hortense. Just as I think maybe we get to know more about Clara, poof, her story disappears, and we are then taken through Samad's brief affair, the description of which, unfortunately, was not brief, and then the battles with the children begin. Samad has twins - Millat and Magid. Archie has a daughter, Irie. Everyone loves Millat, and I just could not fathom why. Millat is a doped out, messed up guy who cares for none, and yet you are apparently meant to like him. Magid is sent to Bangladesh for some inane reason. And oh gosh,  by now I was losing it.

This was Zadie Smith's first novel. I can't even begin to explain where I started to hate this. Was it when Smith brings in the Chalfens? Perhaps. But no, I think I hated this novel before it really began. And then, it never ended. But it never began for it to end. Tired of my review? You can understand exactly how tired I was of this novel. I am not the first. Anita Nair had enough of it here and so did Dan Schnieder, who called it a 'horrendously bad book.' I so agree with him. Rambling, confused, bloated plot with characters you can't care about - it was just a nightmare. I wanted to throw it away somewhere in the middle but then I have a friend who believes that bad books should not be abandoned - and each time I thought of dumping White Teeth, then I would be reminded of her look of utter disappointment, and the conversation that would follow. "Oh, here you go again, not giving a book time, adding one more to your to-be-read-sometime shelf, sigh, such a waste," and I would remember that, and pull through yet another torturous page. But really though : life is so short, time is so little, should we really waste it all by sloughing through such books simply because they MUST be read?

Verdict : HORRENDOUS


Rating : 0/5