White Teeth

Zadie Smith's debut novel arrives already carrying the weight of a publishing sensation — sold on a partial manuscript, trumpeted before publication — and by most accounts earns it: an exuberant, densely peopled saga tracking two wartime friends, one English and one Bangladeshi, and their families through three decades of north London life. Critics greeted it as an astonishingly assured first novel, praising the sheer energy of the prose, the Dickensian sweep of the ensemble cast, and a comic voice that moves nimbly between satire and tenderness. Its great subject is the immigrant experience of multicultural London, and its warmest praise is reserved for how it renders that world — identity, inheritance, faith, belonging — with humor and empathy rather than polemic.

The book's weaknesses are as widely discussed as its strengths, and they are largely the shadow side of its virtues. Reviewers who admire the exuberance also note that the plot sprawls, that digressions pile on digressions, and that some of the satire tips into cartoon, particularly in the second half as the families' lives tangle with a wealthy, self-consciously liberal household. The ending has drawn the sharpest split: for some it lands as a sly, fateful flourish; for others it feels engineered — a contrivance resolving a story that had grown too tangled to finish honestly. A minority of critics went further, arguing the novel knows a thousand things but too few people, a charge the author herself half-accepted even while rejecting its dismissal of her peers.

Underneath the comedy is a serious meditation on roots: whether anyone can choose their inheritance or only answer for it, and what it means to be English when England has been remade by the people it once ruled. The disagreement about the book is essentially a disagreement about appetite — whether its manic inclusiveness is vital comic abundance or a failure of focus — and readers have been taking sides ever since. Most agree, though, that as a first novel it is remarkable, and that its portrait of London at the turn of the millennium has only gained in resonance.