I’ve heard a lot about Zadie Smith. And about White Teeth, it goes without saying. And I was really excited to read this book finally.

It did not disappoint me at all.

The novel is centered on two families: the Jones and the Iqbals. Archibald Jones is English, but his wife (Clara) is Jamaican and half his age. Samad Iqbal is Bengali, and is married to Alsana in an arranged union (that is arranged before she’s even born). The first part of the story is concerned with them. Both Archie and Samad fought together in WWII, and then moved on to love nearby in North London. Being as different as they are, they are an unlikely pair and yet, they are friends. One of my favorite characters here is Clara, who lost all her teeth in a motorcycle accident when she was a teenager (and she uses prosthesis since then). I liked her because she sounds fun and nice to be around. She grew up in a fundamentalist Jehovah’s Witness household, but as she grows up, she loses the contact with her childhood faith.

Samad is one of those characters that I had a hard time liking. To be absolutely honest, during most of the book I wanted to slap him very hard. Supposedly, he was a devout Muslim, but throughout the novel he does a lot of shitty things (cheats on his wife, sends one of his sons away “to save him from Western corruption, and so on). And he was a bit of a bigot. To be very honest, I couldn’t like him much. He annoyed me way too much. I did like his wife, though. She was cool. And their lesbian niece was also cool and fun to read. Samad, on the other hand, was something more like “can this guy die now, please?”

The second part of the novel deals with the children of these two families. The Jones have Irie, and the Iqbals have the twins Millat and Magid. These two are fun because they are very different. At one point, Samad decides to send one of them to Bangladesh. He chooses Magid, because he will take more from the experience. His idea with this is to raise a son with the morality and behavior of a good Bengali man. Of course, things don’t go as expected. When Magid grows up (being a fairly decent boy, well behaved), he decides to study law (instead of medicine, as his parents wanted him) and becomes an atheist (pretty much the opposite of what his dad wanted). And Millat, the boy who stays with his parents, becomes some sort of rebellious religious fundamentalist (at one point, he goes to a protest and book-burning against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses).

Irie Jones spends half the novel in love with Millat. Probably because he’s got the “bad-boy charm” and Irie is a teenager. However, when both of them and another boy from their class get caught smoking pot, things quickly change. Joshua Chalfen, the third boy, comes from an academically successful family. The school decides that Millat and Irie would benefit from some Chalfen influence and makes them go every week to their house. Mrs. Chalfen in particular is very much smitten with Millat (bad boy charm again), and he quickly learns to manipulate her to do whatever he wants.

As time goes on, Irie and Millat become part of the Chalfen’s family life. Irie begins working for Mr. Chalfen, a scientist who works in genetics (or something). Somehow, he manages to get Magid’s address (Magid is an avid science nerd), and they strike a correspondence that ends up getting the boy back in the UK.

I won’t say much more about the plot because I’ like to write a little bit about my impressions of this book. To begin with, it’s funny. Not funny in a I’m-about-to-pee-myself, but the kind of funny that makes you chuckle in the subway (I just loved the jokes about KEVIN). The story also deals with immigration, and the cultural shocks it brings up in people. While Alsana seems to adjust normally to her life as an immigrant in the UK, Samad does not and tries to fight his new cultural environment all the time. And the way the novel works with fundamentalist (of a lot of different things) is very interesting. I usually dislike any sort of fundamentalism, but this novel managed to show them into quite a different light (I’m still not Samad’s biggest fan, though).

So, I’d recommend this book with my eyes closed. And I’ll absolutely read more of Zadie Smith’s literature soon.