First bite

>> Zadie Smith's debut novel White Teeth marks her as a major writer

by JULIET WATERS

Early on the morning of January 1, 1975, Archibald Jones takes an honest stab at his New Year's resolution to kill himself. With a defective Hoover, the only possession retained from his recent divorce, he attempts to gas himself in his car. But fate has other plans for Archie. He has parked in the delivery area of the Hussein-Ishmael butcher shop and Mo Hussein-Ishmael is not the type to allow personal tragedy to muck up his business day. Pulling out the towels that are sealing the car window he screams at Archie, "We're not licensed for suicides around here. This place halal. Kosher, understand? If you're going to die around here, my friend, I'm afraid you've got to be thoroughly bled first."

As Zadie Smith tells us in her debut novel, White Teeth, "Although he was not one of her better specimens, Life wanted Archie and Archie, much to his own surprise, wanted Life."

If there are any white middle-aged men who want to resurrect the cultural appropriation debate, this would be the year to do it. Zadie Smith is not the first young female author to open her novel with a middle-aged man's suicide attempt. A.L. Kennedy did it earlier this year with Everything You Need. But Smith, as far as I know, is the first black female author to do it and at 24, she's nowhere close to middle age.

Because of the multi-cultural polyglot epic she creates in her satire of London in the last quarter century, reviews have tended to compare her to Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureshi. But in many ways Smith sounds more often like Martin Amis. In her love of minor characters, mutant working-class settings, elaborately invented histories and especially in her talent for mimicry, Smith may have more in common with this middle-aged white writer than with anyone.

This isn't to say that Smith's writing is inherently masculine. There's none of Rushdie's or Amis's arrogance. Her satire is by and large gentler and sunnier. If one tends to compare her to male writers it may be because in this era of Bridget

Joneses, there's nothing neurotic or self-conscious in her voice. White Teeth is simply the very self-assured work of a prodigy whose vocation is clearly to be a major writer. The most remarkable thing about her is not her gender or race, but her age.

Smith's novel starts as, but doesn't remain, Archie's story. Still, he is the innocuous core that links a huge cast of eccentric characters, foremost his war buddy and closest friend Samad Iqbal. Archie accepts his rather bland life, his only out-of-the-ordinary act being his second marriage to a beautiful but literally toothless Jamaican girl. Samad, on the other hand, despises himself for his inability to succeed beyond his job as a waiter. His ambitions, as much spiritual as professional, have been projected onto the eldest of his twin sons, Magid, whom he sends back to India to learn to become a decent Muslim.

Ironically, it's the other twin, the sexy, charismatic "bad seed" Millat who will become the fundamentalist Muslim, albeit a rather dysfunctional zealot. With his equally confused first-generation friends, Abdul-Colin and Abdul-Jimmy, Millat becomes part of a group who will protest Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. As pointed out by Archie's daughter, Irie, the group, KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) "has an acronym problem." But this is symptomatic of the identity crisis that all of Archie and Samad's children have finding their place in this radically shifting working-class world.

In the end, White Teeth returns to Archie, the only person seemingly liberated from an identity complex, if only because he's chosen so persistently to be anonymous. A man "whose significance in The Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios. Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack."

But while Smith's voice (and personality by all accounts) is remarkably humble, in the Greater Scheme of Things it's unlikely she will remain as unremarkable as her main character. :

White Teeth by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, pb, 462 pp, $24.99