Word: smith
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Christian, Englishman or Bengali; he lived for the in between, he lived up to his middle name, ‘Zulfikar,’ the clashing of two swords.” Like many of the writers of the emergent “hysterical realism” movement, Smith sets her agenda in character dynamics rather than plot. Dialogue explicates characterization well beyond the ability of any narrative description, and Smith’s skill with dialects provides comic relief through amusing background characters. With their delight in vulgar-language, even in salutation, two ancient and impossibly rude Jamaicans, Denzel...
Archie floats serenely above the new racial order, buoyed by his belief in the power of the coin toss. But Samad, confronted with a hostile, foreign culture and a young, indifferent wife, retreats into what he thinks he knows best: his own culture and religion. Smith makes it clear, however, that the latter—already irrevocably changed by his life in England—is reaching for a past that never existed...
...Smith is at her parodic peak when depicting the characters’ cultural misunderstandings, and their casual racism. In a flashback where the pair are lost in a tank, waiting out a war, Samad and Archie’s talk inevitably turns to girls, specifically Samad’s unborn betrothed. This amuses Archie. “‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’ ‘Where you come from it is customary to boil...
Samad and Archie’s stories, as well as the stories from their long-suffering young wives’ points of view, make up the first and best half of the book. But “White Teeth” changes once Smith takes up the mantle of the new generation, the products of cross-cultural fertilization. Smith provides a snapshot of Archie’s daughter Irie writing feverishly in her diary. Her depiction of overwrought adolescence is pitch-perfect: “8:30 P.M. Millat just walked in. He’s sooo gorgeous but ultimately...
...Smith ties up the characters’ story arcs into a neat little bundle at the end of the book. She contrives to unite the old and young in one room. Every main character attends the launch of a genetically engineered mouse with something to prove, whether in protestation or celebration. By putting them together to duke it out, Smith purposefully offers a chance for redemption and closure unavailable in real life. This conclusion is an unsatisfying end, but the point of the book is not the plot. Her rich, realistic portrayal of the characters and their view of London...