White Teeth

White Teeth
Zadie Smith (Random House, 2000)

White Teeth is one of those books I’d been meaning to read. When On Beauty was published, you couldn’t pick up a literary publication without an article on Zadie Smith. And I like to start at the beginning, so: White Teeth, Zadie Smith’s debut novel, published at age 23.

White Teeth is an ambitious work that only partly achieves its ambitions. In many ways, it reflects the youth of its author: it’s far-reaching with a confident voice. Though at times charming, I do have my reservations about the book. Smith attempts to delve into racial identity, randomness vs. control, religious vs. scientific fanaticism, history vs. the modern condition–a lot to squeeze into a book that also has about 20 characters to follow, even with 450 pages. White Teeth has an epic span to it, following two families of immigrants to England, as well as incidental characters here and there. Each new character that gets introduced gets his/her own share of background and contextualization, then picks up the narrative thread as the character to proceed with at any given time.

As a cultural anthropologist, Smith is first-rate. She really successfully captures the interiority of a very wide range of ethnicities, age groups, etc. My complaint is this: with so many characters being followed, readers lose sight of their favorites. I, for example, quite enjoyed the stories of the 2nd generation: Irie, Millat, and Magid. We become intimately connected to them for a hundred pages, then their stories are lost amidst the telling of minor characters’ stories. By the time Smith gets around to personalizing Josh Chalfen’s story (a friend of the teenage characters), I was fresh out of empathy. I found it quite impossible to care about each and every one of them.

This is a dizzying narrative, but she does succeed in juggling the narrative threads pretty well–until the end. The ending was my least favorite part. It felt forced, rushed, and melodramatic. Smith attempts to tie all the varying threads together in a climactic event that, to me, felt arbitrary. Smith’s strength is character, and the way she neatly ties up the plot threads at the end does not do justice to the rest of the novel.

A brief note about the teeth of the title: Two of the main characters have teeth issues–but they are only two of the 20 with whom readers become intimate throughout the course of the novel. Smith quite frequently uses teeth as a convenient metaphor in the narrative for emotive desciptions. As an overall metaphor, however, it does function: gritting one’s teeth; and teeth as a cultural and class signifier.

Despite my reservations, I do recommend reading this book. The characters are colorful, and the narration offers an insightful view into a piece of present-day England. For readers who enjoy multi-generational stories and ethnographic snapshots, I think you’ll enjoy this.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

A Short History of Nearly Everything
(Broadway Books, 2003)
Bill Bryson

A Short History of Nearly Everything was not on my radar–and with good reason: the project of trying to describe every material function on earth is one that would normally make me break out in sweats of skepticism. But I’m new in town, so when a friend suggested joining a book club, I thought why not? My dance card isn’t exactly full these days.

Bryson’s book was on the menu for November’s meeting, so I picked it up. It started with the big bang (where else?), and went from there through a medley of natural phenomena. His approach to the book was more the history of how ideas that formed science came to be. To this end, he includes quite a few (I mean, really, quite a few) anecdotes about the lives of the scientists behind the science. To me, this got to be too much. Clearly Bryson is a humanist more than a scientist–as am I. But as such, I was hoping to learn a little more actual science from this book (you know–beef up my big bang theories for insertion at appropriate intervals at cocktail parties). Instead, Bryson often chose to relegate the explanations about various scientific nomenclature to the footnotes, while he spent page after page on the factoids of John Q. Scientist’s life. Certain chapters read like science gossip rags. (Though at the bookclub meeting, those with a more science-y background found the gossip to be the best part.)

But I kept plowing through, and it got better. Bryson pretty quickly surpassed my previous science knowledge–which basically included college astronomy, high school biology and chemistry, and whatever muck they teach you in the grades before that (What? I was an English major). So once we got into uncharted territory, I was hooked. The physics sections were really interesting to me, and Bryson is great at making abstract concepts appealing and exciting. In fact, I’d consider Bryson’s tone throughout to be excited. Clearly he, like me, was coming at much of this stuff for the first time (he admits it), and was able to imbue it with a sense of wonder in a how-the-hell-did-they-figure-that-out? sort of way.

My favorite chapter was that on volcanoes. Did you know that Yellowstone is an active supervolcano–meaning that not only does the entire park fit snugly in the cone of the volcano, but that it is ready to erupt at anytime!? This came after chapters on our inevitable collisions with asteroids and our overdue faultlines. The earth is volatile, and our knowledge of it–even more so.

I was further impressed by just how recent much of our knowledge of the earth is. And how much guessing and fallibility is involved (the guy who thought that putting lead in everything was a great idea–duh! we say now; but back then, who knew?).

Treat this book as a pu pu platter of science curios, heavy on the wacky scientist factoids, and you’ll likely enjoy it. You might even pick up a few references to insert into your own witty repairtee. If you’re looking for this book to get you past the first cocktail in a chat with astrophysicists, though, you’re probably better looking into books more specialized by subject.