“White Teeth” by Zadie Smith
Ok, updated ranking list. And yes, I do feel bad about making you guys do this to the top 3. If it makes you feel any better, I sent in my top three as well… and I’m constantly changing it in my head.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.
Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
I read Zadie Smith for the first time in Uni years ago, and remember really enjoying her (we read NW) but I wouldn’t have said that anything in particular stood out to me. However, reading White Teeth was a whole ‘nother experience. I loved it. Hot take: Zadie Smith is an amazing writer. She’s quite playful with language and the structure of storytelling as a whole, and she has this bizarre sense of upbeat nihilism which I really appreciate. The ending was perfect: the belief that we are so important and the main characters in our own story is shown to be quite farcical and false in the final chapter. There are too many stories to tell for ours to be all important.
As I’m trying to keep this short to not give you guys too much to read, I’ll leave you with one quote that hit me right in the chest.
“And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie… and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?” (page 407)
Pacing: She opens and closes with a banger of a scene. My edition was 540 pages and never once was I bored. The transition from one generation’s stories to another’s was smooth and read like life. Suddenly one story didn’t matter as much as another, but there were still threads from the past narrative running through the present. I’m realising I like novels that do this (see my blog about Life After Life.)
Language/Style: As I said, Smith has a lot of fun with language and how we tell stories in the first place. She packs so much worth and layers into such a deceptively simple style.
What was the aftertaste? She tackles a lot of big questions like faith vs. worship vs. religion, extremism as a form of rebellion, the lengths we humans go to to create meaning out of nothing, surviving in an ambivalent universe, fate and how we use it as justification for our actions (or inactions), I mean really my little existential heart was having a field day. It took a while for some of her themes to really sink in, and it doesn’t really all come together until the end but when it does…. holy crap. One of the best endings of a book I’ve read in a long time.
Did it teach me anything? I am still not really sure what I meant by this category, but it seemed important. I guess what I took away from White Teeth is a deeper insight into the world of immigrants and what happens to the next generation. There was also a lot of plot around the tendency to visit your traumas on your children (something maybe we’re all familiar with? Or at least most of us…). She begs the question what does fate mean and does it even matter? How do we stay in control? How do we find our own way, despite familial expectations? What does it mean to belong, and how does belonging transcend geographical boundaries?
So yeah, lots to think about.
Highly recommend this book and who knows. Maybe the Ink Drinkers dip our toes into non-fiction with some of Zadie Smith’s essays….
Happy Reading everyone,
Bryanna