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Title: White Teeth
Author: Zadie Smith
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: Generations of British immigrants find each other mutually incomprehensible, possibly because they don't understand themselves, either.
Thoughts: I should know by now that when a critically adored literary novel is hailed as funny, it means that there are half a dozen wry asides and one or two moments of slapstick, usually employed in place of a climax to highlight the ridiculousness of the human situation.
White Teeth is certainly no exception. Douglas Adams this is not, nor is it even Catch-22. Also, by "warm", we apparently mean "you spend most of the novel buried in the psyches of people who are supposed to be treated with gentle humor but are actually just pathetic verging on loathsome".
I'll admit, I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. It focuses on the parents and children in three different families, each in different stages of immigration. There's the couple born in Bangladesh who send one son back home, the ancestrally-Englishman married to a second generation Jamaican immigrant with third generation English blood, and the thoroughly-assimilated descendants of Jewish immigrants a couple generations back. It oddly reminded me of Glee, in which every character is kind of a terrible person, but while the parents are irredeemably stuck as miserable excuses for human beings, the children still have the possibility of growing out of their idiocy. Oh, they take ridiculously extremist views of the world, but who could blame them with parents like that?
I started out mildly amused. But as Samad to destroy his family as he takes out his frustrations at his own disappointment and hypocrisy, I completely lost any sympathy for him. Empathy, perhaps. But while I can understand how an ambitious man might be broken by a perpetual career as a waiter after an accident kills his chance to be a war hero, the fact that he entirely takes out his frustration on his family and cannot bring himself to consider the consequences of his actions completely destroyed any sympathy I had for him. His choices devastate his wife and warp his sons, and he entirely blames them for a state of affairs which is completely his fault. I began to hate the book.
When the viewpoint suddenly switched Irie, though, it recaptured my attention. And while the younger generation has its faults (Magid, especially, is an enigma not only to his own family, but to us, and seems to be more a plot device than anything else), they're more inherently interesting and likeable than their elders. Possibly because their parents' wounds seem self-inflicted, but the children's wounds are all caused by the parents.
So it was with mixed emotions that I reached the climax. When I realized what was actually going on, and the clever reference to an earlier incident I had come to think of as pointless, I was genuinely delighted. But then paragraph-long denouement left me unsatisfied and once again irritated.
Is this an important book, especially in the exploration of race relations and immigration? Perhaps. It's certainly more worthy and less cheap than made-for-book-clubs pablum such as Little Bee. The immigrants at least get the dignity of being complicatedly-failing people--they are not caricatures, whether of the bogeymen of the anti-immigration crowd or the magical Negroes you get with ignorant wannabe liberal screeds. I would rather read about these nuanced people sliding towards extremism (even if I want to strangle most of them) than an over-simplified diatribe or apologia about why brown people hate white people. This is at least interesting, and doesn't leave me feeling dirty.
But if I had a friend like Samad, I'd slowly ease him out of my life. So it was with great reluctance that I let him take so much of my headspace for the length of time it took me to read this, and I would not willingly allow him to return.
Author: Zadie Smith
Genre: Literary fiction
Thingummies: 3
Synopsis: Generations of British immigrants find each other mutually incomprehensible, possibly because they don't understand themselves, either.
Thoughts: I should know by now that when a critically adored literary novel is hailed as funny, it means that there are half a dozen wry asides and one or two moments of slapstick, usually employed in place of a climax to highlight the ridiculousness of the human situation.
White Teeth is certainly no exception. Douglas Adams this is not, nor is it even Catch-22. Also, by "warm", we apparently mean "you spend most of the novel buried in the psyches of people who are supposed to be treated with gentle humor but are actually just pathetic verging on loathsome".
I'll admit, I'm still not sure how I feel about this book. It focuses on the parents and children in three different families, each in different stages of immigration. There's the couple born in Bangladesh who send one son back home, the ancestrally-Englishman married to a second generation Jamaican immigrant with third generation English blood, and the thoroughly-assimilated descendants of Jewish immigrants a couple generations back. It oddly reminded me of Glee, in which every character is kind of a terrible person, but while the parents are irredeemably stuck as miserable excuses for human beings, the children still have the possibility of growing out of their idiocy. Oh, they take ridiculously extremist views of the world, but who could blame them with parents like that?
I started out mildly amused. But as Samad to destroy his family as he takes out his frustrations at his own disappointment and hypocrisy, I completely lost any sympathy for him. Empathy, perhaps. But while I can understand how an ambitious man might be broken by a perpetual career as a waiter after an accident kills his chance to be a war hero, the fact that he entirely takes out his frustration on his family and cannot bring himself to consider the consequences of his actions completely destroyed any sympathy I had for him. His choices devastate his wife and warp his sons, and he entirely blames them for a state of affairs which is completely his fault. I began to hate the book.
When the viewpoint suddenly switched Irie, though, it recaptured my attention. And while the younger generation has its faults (Magid, especially, is an enigma not only to his own family, but to us, and seems to be more a plot device than anything else), they're more inherently interesting and likeable than their elders. Possibly because their parents' wounds seem self-inflicted, but the children's wounds are all caused by the parents.
So it was with mixed emotions that I reached the climax. When I realized what was actually going on, and the clever reference to an earlier incident I had come to think of as pointless, I was genuinely delighted. But then paragraph-long denouement left me unsatisfied and once again irritated.
Is this an important book, especially in the exploration of race relations and immigration? Perhaps. It's certainly more worthy and less cheap than made-for-book-clubs pablum such as Little Bee. The immigrants at least get the dignity of being complicatedly-failing people--they are not caricatures, whether of the bogeymen of the anti-immigration crowd or the magical Negroes you get with ignorant wannabe liberal screeds. I would rather read about these nuanced people sliding towards extremism (even if I want to strangle most of them) than an over-simplified diatribe or apologia about why brown people hate white people. This is at least interesting, and doesn't leave me feeling dirty.
But if I had a friend like Samad, I'd slowly ease him out of my life. So it was with great reluctance that I let him take so much of my headspace for the length of time it took me to read this, and I would not willingly allow him to return.
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no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 01:18 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2012-04-17 01:48 am (UTC)From:But she has a certain ironic detachment that is grating. Each of her characters is lovingly described, with all of their flaws enumerated. And none of their strengths. Every single character is pitiable and deeply flawed. There is no unwarped love in this book. There is no justified pride, no untainted accomplishment, no acts of decency or real kindness. There are the not-very-good people who have no illusions of their goodness and there are the terrible people who are convinced that they are deeply moral but do everything for the most self-deceptively venal of reasons. It's a terribly cynical way of looking at the world, and in the end, I felt like the author always thought that she was superior to all of her characters. They're each locked into their viewpoints so tightly that they strangle themselves. Since she can see outside of their heads, she is clearly more wise than they.