White Teeth

A sprawling, energetic novel about multicultural London, following three families across generations in Smith's brilliant exploration of identity, belonging, and the immigrant experience.

White Teeth follows the interconnected lives of the Joneses, the Iqbals, and the Chalfens across several decades in North London. Archie Jones, a working-class Englishman, and Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim, forged an unlikely friendship during World War II that continues into their middle age as they struggle to raise their children in a rapidly changing society.

Smith's debut novel is remarkable for its scope and ambition—she tackles issues of race, religion, class, and cultural identity with both intellectual rigor and infectious humor. The novel moves seamlessly between different time periods and perspectives, showing how the past continues to influence the present in unexpected ways.

The younger generation—Archie's daughter Irie and Samad's twin sons Millat and Magid—must navigate between their parents' expectations and their own desires for independence. Each character represents a different response to the challenges of multicultural identity: assimilation, rebellion, religious fundamentalism, or the attempt to forge a new synthesis.

Smith's prose is energetic and inventive, capable of both broad comedy and moments of genuine pathos. She has a particular gift for dialogue, capturing the rhythms and inflections of different communities with remarkable accuracy. The novel's London is a vibrant, chaotic place where different cultures collide and combine in unpredictable ways.

The novel's climax, involving genetic engineering and a mouse named FutureMouse, brings together all the book's themes about nature versus nurture, tradition versus progress, and the possibility of controlling the future. Smith suggests that attempts to engineer perfect outcomes—whether genetic, cultural, or personal—are doomed to failure because life is inherently messy and unpredictable.

White Teeth was an immediate critical and commercial success, establishing Smith as a major literary talent and inspiring a generation of multicultural British fiction.