Swing Time

I thoroughly enjoyed Zadie Smith's Swing Time. It is quite hilarious, bringing to mind White Teeth's multiracial working-class through the unnamed narrator's upbringing, mixed heritage, and close friendship rooted in dance with another brown girl. For the addicting prose, wit, and humor, I struggle to agree with some of the mixed reviews this novel received. However, there was something lacking in the narrative structure, particularly regarding some of the relationships (I'm thinking mainly of the narrator and Fern, the latter's love for the former striking me as unrealistic) and plot arcs that do not pay off or seem plausible. Nonetheless, I love Smith's subtle approach and characteristic wit, which appears to capture brilliantly the paranoid worldview of (some) the working-class, the fundamental dishonesty of the "woke" boyfriend of the narrator in her college years, celebrity culture's pitfalls, and the image of Africa (specifically, Gambia). Smith also playfully confronts the "tragic mulatto" trope, the sordid history of exploitation of black bodies (through dance, music, and other avenues), but never loses sight of the universal and the narrator's struggle to not be alone. Furthermore, this novel fits quite well with Smith's recent essay on appropriation as it deals with dance, race, gender, and famous cases of appropriation in dance history. Overall, a successful and engaging read that is more amusing than NW but less interesting than On Beauty or White Teeth. 

White Teeth on TV: Incomplete Miniseries

I am not sure how to describe the White Teeth miniseries. It leaves one feeling incomplete, to put it bluntly. I understand how difficult it is to adapt a novel to film or television, and I respect the admirable attempt, but one cannot escape the feeling of a loss of wholeness. The miniseries hits most of the main plot points and retains much of the characteristic humor of Zadie Smith's first novel, but suffers from the loss of her witty narrative voice.

In addition, certain key parts of the novel, especially those pertaining to the Jamaican background of Irie, are silenced. Clara, after the first episode, becomes gradually less significant to the story, and while Irie does learn more about her 'roots' from talking to her Jehovah's Witness grandmother, all of the horror and critique of colonialism is lost by the lack of a flashback scene. The only time we are taken back to Kingston in 1907 is one single flashback, to the white colonial and his black lover who are the ancestors Irie desires to learn more about. None of the narrative voice's powerful critique equating colonialism to the poor treatment we give to our lovers is present in this miniseries, which is woefully incomplete.

Besides slightly changing the conclusion of the novel and omitting other plot developments, settings, and themes (such as the importance of the traditional pub for Irie's father and Samad, who never take their wives with them there), the miniseries could have benefited from illustrating the tense relations between ethnic minorities in London. Smith's novel is careful to display, for example, Alsana's racism towards Caribbeans and other minorities, but this brief miniseries only shows Alsana's homophobia towards her lesbian relative.

In spite of my aforementioned problems with the miniseries, I believe it's a worthwhile watch for any fans of Zadie Smith, multicultural London, or comedy. Again, much of the comedic voice has been changed because of the medium, but the actors carry it along quite well. All that would have been necessary to truly make this TV adaptation of Smith's novel a masterpiece is a few more episodes.

Zadie Smith's Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays

Just finished reading Zadie Smith's "Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays" and loving it. How could I have ignored her essay writing talent by focusing solely on her novels? Even when discussing classics of English and European literature I have not personally read, her essays are still accessible, witty, humorous, and thought-provoking. I knew from the start it would be a good collection of essays due to her balanced perspective on Zora Neale Hurston. In addition, she deconstructs some of the problems in how one approaches writing, literary criticism, and is unafraid to write personal pieces about her own identity as a black woman, specifically in how it relates to how we perceive President Obama. Her cautious optimism about her experience in Liberia and thoughtful film criticism also opened my eyes. From now on, I'll make sure to read Smith's essays as religiously as I follow her novels.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty

“The street, the global street, lined with hustling brothers working corners from Roxbury to Casablanca, from South Central to Cape Town” (245-246).

I am unsure what to think of Zadie Smith's On Beauty...but undoubtedly my favorite character is the wannabe-gansta Levi Belsey, son of a British professor at an elite university and living in suburban Boston, yet pretending to be from Roxbury and speaking in an incomprehensible manner 99.9 percent of the world cannot understand (yet he thinks it's 'hood'). In addition, Smith reveals some deep appreciation for poetry, Haitian art, transatlantic families and the New England urban/suburban landscape, as well as a scathing look at university politics. The above painting, "Maitresse Erzulie" by Hector Hyppolite, a legendary Haitian painter, depicts the loa associated with love and sexuality, very appropriate for a novel about the pursuit of beauty in all its forms as well as the dangers of such pursuits. Oh, and Zora Belsey, a 'big' mixed-race girl, is very similar to Irie from White Teeth, since both are 'big girls' in love with young men out of their league. Haitian immigrants appear everywhere in the novel, from the cleaning ladies and maids of the Belseys and rival family of conservatives, the Kipps (also transatlantic, with Afro-Caribbean/British identities instead of the African-American/White English Belsey clan), to the cleaning staff at Wellington, the elite private university in the town of Wellington, a suburb of Boston. Haitians feature prominently to highlight 'essentialized blackness,' beauty where you'd least expect it (Haitian art, specifically, the paintings of the Haitian loa associated with beauty and sexuality, or beauty from a land of misery and ugliness, as one may assume from Levi's one book he read on Haiti) and the racial/class hierarchies of New England. In addition, the emphasis on the part of Howard Belsey, the English liberal professor specializing in Rembrandt and European art history is matched by the emphasis on Haitian painting, suggesting some equivalency in terms of artistic merit, despite the lack of universal recognition of Haitian art, unlike that accorded to Rembrandt. 

Anyway, it is difficult not to think of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God when reading this novel, since some of the characters, particularly Monty Kipps' daughter, Victoria, could be read as personifications of the Haitian Vodou pantheon, particularly Erzulie. Indeed, the theme of the pursuit of beauty as the cause of one's downfall could be read in Howard's infidelity with Victoria, the young, amazing-looking black woman who, despite being the daughter of his enemy, Monty Kipps, a black British conservative of Afro-Caribbean roots who despises affirmative action, liberals, gays, and wants to take "the liberal out of liberal arts," represents the power of beauty to distract and lead one to one's destruction. Likewise, the Hyppolite painting and it's beauty (as well as worth), leads Levi astray into theft, stealing it from Kipps' office at Wellington University, so clearly the potentially negative power of beauty is something Smith stresses. Indeed, perhaps some of this beauty is more akin to Lasiren, and sirens more generally. But like Zora Neale Hurston (notice how one of Howard and Kiki's children is named Zora?) the dialogue of the text often contains some more form African-American vernacular English (primarily through the slang spoken by gansta-wannabe Levi) and a general love story ransacked by infidelity and marital troubles, just as Kiki, like Janie, learns to love herself (though taking joy in the creations of her marriage to Howard, their three children). The homages to Haitian Vodou loa of beauty, Erzulie, as well as a reference to the motif of crossroads in African-American music, an obvious allusion to Papa Legba, a trickster figure important for opening the doors to communication with the gods (which occurs since Carl, the disadvantaged employee in the African American Music Library at Wellington essentially paves the way for Levi to return and steal the Hyppolite painting!). Thus, Haitian Vodou and influences from Haitian popular religion, as well as echoes of Zora Neale Hurston, rear their head in the novel's characters and plot, a sign of the archetypal Vodou lwa. 

The E.M. Forster homages are beyond my understanding, since I have yet to read any Forster. But if there is an influence in the prose of Smith, then perhaps I should. The novel is humorous, very British in its narration, and, like White Teeth, slightly hysterical at times in its vivid descriptions of characters and settings. It also serves as an ugly reminder of class stratification within Black America as as source of divide, the insidious politics of universities and the battle between left and right within the ivory tower, censorship, and, of course, marital strife, the family as a metaphor for the troubles of the human condition and nations, the notion of diaspora and transatlantic family, and, more broadly, the moral weaknesses of both liberals and conservatives in the battle for the soul of the US and the UK. Overall, this is a fascinating novel replete with a plethora of insightful themes and commentary, as well as a prominent place for Haitian Boston and the centrality of race on both sides of the Atlantic. Though not nearly as moving or strong as White Teeth, I enjoyed this novel far more than NW, which likewise featured a diverse cast of characters living in northwestern London. I would give this a 4 out of 5 stars. For an interesting look at the novel focusing on Haitian influences, check out this.

Zadie Smith's White Teeth and the Centrality of World War II

After listening to an interesting lecture by a professor, Michelle M. Wright, from Northwestern on "Black physics," or adapting theories of physics to the study of the African diaspora, the lecturer incorporated Zadie Smith's brilliant White Teeth into her lecture (I have blogged about the novel, here). The professor's videos can be found here, in 3 parts. I am a little disappointed to not have seen some of the obvious ties to World War II, eugenics, and Nazi racial theory that permeate Smith's text through the middle-class, liberal white family, whose male patriarch seeks to improve humanity through creation of a better, superior breed. The eugenicist-leaning white family, the middle-class liberal Chalfens, eventually takes in one of the twin brothers of Bangladeshi descent, and the mother of said white family falls in love with the beautiful, young brown man. Needless to say, the family's obsession with eugenics can be traced, in part, to Nazi racial theory and genocide, which is one of the ways World War II is central to the multiracial, immigrant communities in postwar Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The Chalfen patriarch's obsession with genetically-engineered mice and the family's political views and sense of self-importance clearly reveal a disturbing, paternalistic eugenicist perspective they have toward immigrants and non-whites. In addition, World War II occupies a large portion of the narrative structure, since it is how Irie's English father met Iqbal, both were serving in Europe during the war, though, as one could guess, their experience was far from heroic. In addition, the postwar years in Britain and other European nations led to opening the doors for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia, often through labour programs that invited workers from India, Pakistan, Algeria, and various other regions of the world to settle and work in the European metropoles just as colonialism's formal structure was dissolving. The following quotations from the text are quite revealing of the Chalfen arrogance, eugenics-leaning beliefs.

"They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers--judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at--there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers on the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce."
  
"In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say."

Zadie Smith's NW

Zadie Smith with her mother, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, a Jamaican woman.

"All of them are Nigerian, all of them, even if they are French, or Algerian, they are Nigerian, the whole of Africa being, for Pauline, essentially Nigeria, and the Nigerians wily, owning those things in Kilburn that once were Irish, and five of the nurses on her own team being Nigerian where once they were Irish, or at least Pauline judges them to be Nigerian, and they're perfectly fine as long as you keep an eye on them every minute. Leah puts her thumbnail to her wedding ring. Pushes the band hard."

Zadie Smith's latest novel, NW, alluding to northwestern London's Willesden, Kilburn, and other neighborhoods where the author grew up, is a tough egg to crack. Unlike White Teeth, I see as more humorous and accessible, NW focuses on 4 different individuals who grew up in the same council estate and, with great detail, changes in narrative structure, and Smith's attempts to make this process seamless, show how the lives of 4 individuals in their 30s intersect. Think of the novel as White Teeth but grown up. In fact, I am quite sure there are allusions to characters from White Teeth in NW, such as Mrs. Iqbal and Irie. Unsurprisingly, this London novel's characters' community possesses a looming presence in the plot, which actually made it difficult to follow since I am not familiar with the London sights or neighborhood Smith so fondly writes of. Like White Teeth, the novel focuses on 'multiracial' contemporary London, with the Irish-descended Leah, the Jamaicans, Keisha/Natalie and Felix, and a St. Lucian, Nathan Bogle. Their loved ones and significant others are also a diverse crew, with multiracial individuals, working-class folks, and other denizens of the cosmopolitan city known as London while the lives of the aforementioned four individuals take drastic turns and each one is forced to think about why they are and what they are.

This novel asks more of the reader than White Teeth. The novel is divided into 4 sections covering the lives of Nathan Bogle, Keisha/Natalie Blake, Leah Hanwell, and Felix and the narrative structure or format changes for each. Beginning with Leah, the novel uses stream of consciousness and then more conventional formats for the other three sections of the text. This novel, however, seems to have been better constructed as a collection of short stories rather than a novel, especially because the two female characters, Leah and her childhood friend, Keisha Blake, receive a disproportionate amount of time while the black men, Nathan and Felix, receive considerably less time in the plot. Thus, this novel could have been better constructed as a a short story or two revolving around Leah and Keisha's friendship and disillusionment with life. However, Smith's nearly seamless writing connects the men to the women thematically based on angst, disappoint with adult life, and the adult struggle for self-definition not limited to societal expectations based on race, class, and gender. Furthermore, Smith critiques notions of professionalization as the key to life, to escaping poverty. Keisha, who renames herself Natalie in college, and then becomes a barrister, ends up right back in her community of impoverished working-class Londoners. And despite her education, her professional career, she could only escape poverty in the end by marrying a wealthy biracial man, Frank, and then living through a loveless marriage, an impoverished family, and a myriad of problems in a quest to find the clarity of life. However, at the end of the novel, the ultimate message on how to attain that clarity, that understanding of self and others, is still disappointingly depicted in such an odd way: Natalie calls the police to inform them of Nathan's possible role in a murder of another character. It creates many more

Nevertheless, Smith's novel, though falling short of her first, is an interesting read. It contains several references to pop culture, television, hip-hop, The Wire, Amy Winehouse, and life in 21st century London. Oddly, however, Smith does not include the Tottenham Riots or other pressing issues affecting contemporary London. As usual, however, she maintains her sense of humor and deprecation in her characters, whose conceptions of the world reveal the contradictions within all of us, especially regarding popular culture, marital infidelity, slang, and how people perceive life, as if there is a set path and it includes a profession, marriage, and children. Moreover, she is willing and able to deliver humorous punches at her character's naivete, limited perception of the human condition, and race in the UK, which has many parallels with the US. For instance, Leah, who marries a gorgeous Afro-French man, Michel, of Algerian and Guadeloupean heritage, is despised and talked about by her mostly black co-workers because she's seen as a white woman stealing "one of their men." Frank, or Franco De Angelis, the half-Trinidadian, half-wealthy Italian, also represents crisis of identity so commonly seen mixed black-white individuals, wanting to embrace a "blackness" that he does not know or have any connections to and thereby coming off as inauthentic and never free from his identity crisis or awareness of his class privilege.

Overall, a worthy read and Smith's shortest novel so far. Though difficult to follow at times, and loaded with subtle philosophical statements on life in modern London, NW succeeds in creating two developed female characters whose relationship enchants, intrigues and speaks to the reader. The central characters' friendship is repaired but there are no clear articulations or obvious answers, so the ending is far from comforting since the lives of the two women are still unclear. Regardless of the somewhat weak (and in my opinion, confusing conclusion) ending, Smith's experimental use of language, her "hysterical irony" and the novel's emphasis on the multiracial folks of Northwest London, make it worth reading.


Here are some great moments in the novel:
1. "Her husband was kinder than any man Leah Hanwell had ever known, aside from her father. And then of course they had been surprised by their own conventionality. The marriage pleased Pauline. It calmed the anxieties of Michel's family. It was pleasing to please their families."

2.  "On Saturday mornings Michel helps the ladies and gentlemen of NW look right for their Saturday nights, look fresh and correct, and there, in the salon, he is free to blast his treacly R&B, his oh baby oh shorty till six in the mawnin' till the break a' dawn."

3.  "People back home, they don't get me at all. I'm too advanced for them. So when they try to contact me, I don't let this--I don't let drama in my life like that. No way! I've worked too hard."

4.  "Former prison guard, social worker, local councilor. How did she get anything done with those talons? Long and curved and painted with miniature renderings of the Jamaican flag. Clawed her way up through the system. Born and bred. Is wary of those, like Leah, whose degrees have thus installed them. To Adina a university degree is like a bungee cord, lowering in and pulling out with dangerous velocity. Of course, you won't be here long. Look, I don't want to give you projects you're not going to be here to finish..."

5.  "Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended for her?? Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh's dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class, sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it. Great fiery arcs, long pointed shadows."

6.  "Although Leah has a blue tongue and a fancy degree and a hot husband and no offense, but for the women in our community, in the Afro-Caribbean community, no offense, but when we see one of our lot with someone like you it's a real issue. It's just a real issue that you should be aware of. No offense. (Brighton weekend, team-building exercise, hotel bar, 2004.)"

7. "In the corridor the women spill out of every room, into the heat, cocoa buttered, ready for a warm night out on the Edgware Road. From St. Kitts, Trinidad, Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Pakistan, in their forties, fifties, sixties, and yet busts and butts and shiny legs and arms still open to the sexiness of an early summer in a manner that the women of Leah's family can never be. For them the sun is fatal. So red, so pale."

8.  "Nathan Bogle: the very definition of desire for girls who had previously only felt that way about certain fragrant erasers. A smile to destroy the resolve of even the strictest teachers, other people's parents. At ten she would have done anything, anything! Now she sees ten-years-olds and cannot believe they have inside them what she had inside her at the same age."

9. "Pauline turns the page with vilence. The windo logs Kilburn's skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety rollercoaster. Higgledy piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box. Behind the opposite window, retreating Willesden. Number 37. In the 1880s or thereabouts the whole thing went up at once--houses, churches, schools, cemeteries--an optimistic vision of Metroland."

10.  "One of the advantages of loving women, of being loved by women: they will always do things far beyond the call of duty."

11.  "Felix sighed and leaned back into his bench and began murmuring. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."


12. "Felix, listen: you can't buy a woman. You can't buy her love. She's gonna leave you that way. Love's gonna leave you anyway so you might as well not bother with the cars and the jewels. Serious."

13.  "Life's not a videogame, Felix--there aren't a certain number of points that send you to the next level. There isn't actually any next level. The bad news is everyone dies at the end. Game over."


14. "It had never occurred to Keisha Blake that her friend Leah Hanwell was in possession of a particular type of personality. Like most children, theirs was a relation based on verbs, not nouns. Leah Hanwell was a person willing and available to do a variety of things that Keisha Blake was willing and available to do."

15. "When being bullied Keisha Blake found it useful to remember that if you read the relevant literature or watched the pertinent movies you soon found that being bullied was practically a sign of superior personality, and the greater the intensity of the bullying the more likely it was to be avenged at the end of life, when qualities of the kind Keisha Blake possessed--cleverness, will-to-power--became "their own reward," and that this remained true even if the people in the literature and the movies looked nothing like you, came from a different socio-economic and historical universe, and--had they ever met you--would very likely have enslaved you or, at best, bullied you to precisely the same extent as Lorna Mackenzie who had a problem with the way you acted like you were better than everyone else."

16."For precisely this reason Keisha has always been wary of Rodney and keen to avoid him--as much as that was possible in a place like Caldwell--on the principle that the last thing a drowning person needs is another drowning person clinging to them."

17.   "We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking," read Rodney, and then made a note by this sentence: "So what? (fallacious argument.)"

18. "There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route."

 

19. "When asked by other students about Frank De Angelis--she was not the only person who had noted their fundamental compatibility--she said that he was too full of himself and vain and posh and racially confused and not her scene at all, and yet the silent and invisible bond between them strengthened, for who else but Frank De Angelis--or someone exactly like Frank De Angelis--could she ask to accompany her on the strange life journey she was preparing to undertake?"

20. "Perhaps sex isn't the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited--there are only so many places for so many things to go--and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank's silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom."

 

21.On Frank: "He did not read or have any real cultural interests, aside from the old nostalgic affection for 90s hip hop. The idea of the Caribbean bored him. When thinking of the souls of black folks he preferred to think of Africa--"Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx"--where the two strains of his DNA did noble battle in ancient stories. (He knew these stories only in vague, biblical outline.)"

 

22. "A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural."

 

23. Reference to The Wire:

"Everyone in both Natalie's workplace and Frank's was intimately involved with the lives of a group of African-Americans, mostly male, who slung twenty-dollar vials of crack in the scrub between a concatenation of terribly designed tower blocks in a depressed and forgotten city with one of the highest murder rates in the United States. That everyone should be so intimately involved in the lives of these young men annoyed Frank, though he could not really put his finger on why, and in protest he exempted himself and his wife from what was by all accounts an ecstatic communal televisual experience."

 

24. "She wanted to give her friend something of equal value in return. If candor were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake's instinct for self-defense, self-preservation, was simply too strong."

 

25. "Through the glass doors they watched the children spinning in the lawn. Leah found the number online. Natalie dialed it. It was Keisha who did the talking. Apart from the fact she drew the phone from her own pocket, the whole process reminded her of nothing so much as those calls the two good friends used to make to boys they liked, back in the day, and always in a slightly hysterical state of mind, two heads pressed together over a handset. "I got something to tell you," said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice." 

Zadie Smith with her father at 5 years old.

Zadie Smith's White Teeth

"If this were a fairy tale, it would now be time for Captain Durham to play hero. He does not seem to lack the necessary credentials. It is not that he isn't handsome, or tall, or strong, or that he doesn't want to help her, or that he doesn't love her (oh, he loves her; just as the English loved India and Africa and Ireland; it is the love that is the problem, people treat their lovers badly)—all those things are true. But maybe it is just the scenery that is wrong. Maybe nothing that happens upon stolen ground can expect a happy ending" (299).

Zadie Smith's  White Teeth lived up to the hype. Whether or not one would consider it the first great novel of the 2000s and proclaim Smith's debut an instant classic depends on one's penchant use of hyperbole. I will admit that I particularly enjoyed Smith's narrative voice, which is indeed quite comedic and ironic in the midst of terrible social conditions and the absurdities as well as inconsistencies of life. Thus, Smith's prose impresses the reader as ingenious, clever, hilarious, and overall engaging in such a way that escapes most novelists' initial works. For these aforementioned reasons, those who make specious claims that the only reason Smith received such critical acclaim because of her youth, stunning beauty, womanhood, and blackness should be rejected. While there is a problem in the novel where female characters are not as fully developed as the males (something Smith alludes to in an interview as one of her weaknesses), Smith's innovative structure of the text poignantly captures the cyclical nature of history and families, and the universality of the human experience which transcends race, nationality, or skin color, which is encapsulated within the novel's title that alludes to something we all share, white teeth. Furthermore, such assumptions about the praise for the work of a woman of color masks feelings of white racial resentment which see whites as threatened by or suffering "reverse discrimination" or "hating on whitey" and thereby fueling undeserved acclaim or mainstream academic support for writers, artists, academics, and writers of marginalized identities.

Moreover, Smith recreates her own world growing up in North London in mixed English and Jamaican family. The other family in the novel is a Bengali immigrant couple and their twin sons, who each adapt to London life and the immigrant  and first generation experience in widely divergent ways. The novel does take some expected directions, with critiques of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, the fatalism of both and especially regarding the Jehovah Witnesses, as well as the extreme of scientific rationalism in the "real" English family, the Chalfens (who are actually of Polish Jewish descent through the father and therefore recent immigrants) which leads to destructive egotism as well as an absence of pathos to understand the myriad ways a project of genetically engineered mice could be abused. However, the religious fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim, who oppose the project as well as the animal rights terrorists cannot evade a moral quandary. Neither can Archibald, who gives up the power to make decisions in his life by tossing a coin instead of taking a decisive stand until the novel's conclusion, once he finally sees that "man makes himself. And he is responsible for what he makes" (Smith 445). The novel also addresses issues of race, immigration, and English identity after decolonization as "hordes" of black and brown people from places such as Jamaica and Bangladesh change the ethnic makeup as well as national identity of Britain as a white, European nation built on imperialism and racism. 

Personally, as someone with little knowledge and exposure to western Europe's expanding African, Asian, and Muslim populations, this novel sheds light on issues of racism and discrimination, as well as miscegenation and the new British identity that cannot be located or replicated in dry statistical analyses and reports. Smith brings to life the experiences of the foreigner, the perpetual outsider who society ostracizes based on religion, race, skin color, sexual orientation, gender, and the persistence of racist beliefs even among those so-called liberal whites, like the Chalfen family. As a person of color living in the United States, which is still identified or perceived by many European-Americans as a white nation primarily, I too have been on the receiving end of racist assumptions and attitudes carried by white characters in the novel. For instance, being assumed to not be from the United States or not considered a "real" American based on racial and ethnic heritage, often mistaken for another despised or unpopular nationality, and always being asked about origins. Likewise, Millat, the rebel twin realizes immediately that regardless of what he says or does, he

"was a Paki matter where he came from; that he smelled of curry; had no sexual identity; took other people's jobs; or gave all the jobs to his relatives; that he could be a dentist or a shop-owner or a curry-shifter, but not a footballer or a filmmaker; that he should go back to his own country; or stay here and earn his bloody keep; that he worshiped elephants and wore turbans; that no one who looked like Millat, or spoke like Millat, or felt like Millat, was ever on the news unless they had recently been murdered. In short, he knew he had no face in this country, no voice in the country, until the week before last when suddenly people like Millat were on every channel and every radio and every newspaper and they were angry, and Millat recognized the anger, thought it recognized him, and grabbed it with both hands" (194).

Overall, an excellent, cleverly-written English novel by a fascinating Jamaican-English writer. Some of the slang and expressions were difficult to follow at times, but mainly due to an ignorance of European English expressions. When Clara or her mother, Hortense Bowden, break down into Jamaican patois it's also interesting since these two women can never leave their homeland behind them. In fact, Shiva states just that to Samad, "Who knows what Shiva Bhagwati would have turned out like back in Calcutta? Prince or pauper? And who," said Shiva, some of his old beauty returning to his face, "can pull the West out of 'em once it's in?" (121) Though some further character development would have been appreciated with Irie and Clara, the two Jamaican/English women in the novel, as well as Irie's grandmother, Hortense, the novel succeeds in creating an inclusive narrative that incorporates English colonialism in Jamaica, the subjugation and dilemma spawned by British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent and how people with roots in widely scattered areas of the British empire intersect globally and locally through immigration to the former metropole. Smith did indeed devise a postcolonial text, but one that cannot be bashed for being unduly critical of Europe or homogenizing the experiences of postcolonial groups either, since Smith does not neglect to mention problems of colorism among the Asians as well as racism between and among Afro-Caribbeans and Asians in Britain. Alsana's thoughts about Clara, the Jamaican wife of her husband Samad's best and only friend unambiguously reveal deep, widely held prejudices and assumptions of inferiority:

"Black people are often friendly, thought Alsana, smiling at Clara, and adding this fact subconsciously to the short "pro" side of the pro and con list she had on the black girl. From every minority she disliked, Alsana liked to single out one specimen for spiritual forgiveness. From Whitechapel, there had been many such redeemed characters. Mr. Van, the Chinese chiropodist, Mr. Segal, a Jewish carpenter, Rosie, a Dominican woman who continuously popped round, much to Alsana's grievance and delight, in an attempt to convert her into a Seventh-Day Adventist--all these lucky individuals were given Alsana's golden reprieve and magically extrapolated from their skins like Beijing tigers" (55). 

Great quotations 

1. Archie's co-worker's statement about Archie marrying a black woman half his age from Jamaica after attempting suicide and trying to change the course of his life.

(59) "Oh, Archie, you are funny," said Maureen sadly, for she had always fancied Archie a bit but never more than a bit because of this strange way he had about him, always talking to Pakistanis and Caribbeans like he didn't even notice and now he'd gone and married one and hadn't even thought it worth mentioning what color she was until the office dinner when she turned up black as anything and Maureen almost choked on her prawn cocktail." 

2. (193) "It was a new breed, just recently joining the ranks of the other street crews: Becks, B-boys, Indie kids, wide-boys, ravers, rudeboys, Acidheads, Sharons, Tracies, Kevs, Nation Brothers, Raggas, and Pakis; manifesting itself as a kind of cultural mongrel of the last three categories. Raggastanis spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati, and English. Their ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing: Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; kung fu and the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani. People had fucked with Rajik back in the days when he was into chess and wore V-necks. People had fucked wih Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teachers' comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. People had even fucked with Millat, with his tight jeans and his white rock."

3. (204) "Finally, O'Connell's. Inevitably, O'Connell's. Simply because you could be without family in O'Connell's, without possessions or status, without past glory or future hope--you could walk through that door with nothing and be exactly the same as everybody else in there. It could be 1989 outside, or 1999, or 2009, and you could still be sitting at the corner in the V-neck you wore to your wedding in 1975, 1945, 1935. Nothing changes here, things are only retold, remembered. That's why old men love it."

4. (238) Alsana on her niece's lesbianism and her partner:

"I'm as liberal as the next person," complained Alsana, once they were alone. "But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not."

5. (262) Joshua's family messed up; obsessed with Chalfenism and itself

"They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers--judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at--there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers on the Mayflower with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce."

6. (264) Joyce and her infatuation with Millat, the handsome son of Samad and Alsana

 "Pulchritude--beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it could signify a belch or skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her checkbook to behind the thick glass of a bank till."

7. (271) Joyce Chalfen's racism and love for Millat and Irie

"You'll stay for dinner, won't you?" pleaded Joyce. "Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don't you, Oscar?"

8. (271) "This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow, and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checkups. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (Her mother thought it best--less trouble)."

9. (287) "Sit down," hissed Alsana, grabbing her by the arm. "Sit down, all right, point made, Miss Clever Lesbian. Look, we need you, OK? Sit down, apology, apology. OK? Better."

10. (288) "But the idea of women loving women was so far from Joyce's cognitive understanding of the world that she couldn't process it. The idea of them. She just didn't get it. God knows, she made the effort."

11. (290) "I can't help thinking," said Marcus, unheeding, "that a Chalfen man and an Iqbal woman would be a hell of a mix. Like Fred and Ginger. You'd give us sex and we'd give you sensibility or something. Hey? You'd keep a Chalfen on his toes--you're as fiery as an Iqbal. Indian passion."

12. (294) "Captain Charlie Dunham was a no-good djam fool bwoy."

13. Captain Dunham's relationship with Ambrosia, great-grandfather of Irie after the earthquake of 1907 destroyed Kingston

(300) "It is a strange feeling, looking out on to an ocean of ebony skins, unable to find the one he loves, the one he thinks he owns. For Durham has orders to stand here and call out the names of the handful of servants, butlers, and maids, the chosen few the English will be taking with them to Cuba until the fires die down. If he knew her last name, God knows he would call it out. But in all that teaching, he never learned it. He never asked."

14. (336) Samad to Irie on his twin sons straying from the life he wanted for them

"They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from the life I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave. All I wanted was two good Muslim boys."

15. (337) Samad on coming to Britain and immigration:

"Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers--who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact...it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere."

16. 338) Hortense on sexism in the Jehovah's Witnesses

"I gat so tired wid de church always tellin' me I'm a woman or I'm nat heducated enough. Everybody always trying' to heducate you; heducate you about dis, heducate you about dat...Dat's always bin de problem wid de women in dis family. Somebody always tryin' to heducate them about someting, pretendin' it all about learnin' when it all about a battle of de wills. But if I were one of de hundred an' forty-four, no one gwan try to heducate  me. Dat would be my job! I'd make my own laws an' I wouldn't be wanting anybody else's opinions. My mudder was strong-willed deep down, and I'm de same. Lord knows, your mudder was de same. And you de same."

17.  (355) "Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn't trust these guys. Irie's job, then, was to give the information as it stood, every time, verbatim from a piece of paper written by Marcus and Magid, stapled to the wall."

18. (359) "In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say."

19. (384) "And it goes to prove what has been said of immigrants many times before now; they are resourceful; they make do. They use what they can when they can."

20. (384) "Whatever road presents itself, they will take, and if it happens to lead to a dead end, well then, Mr. Schmutters and Mr. Banajii will merrily set upon another, weaving their way through Happy Multicultural Land. Well, good for them. But Magid and MIllat couldn't manage it. They left that neutral room as they had entered it: weighed down, burdened, unable to waver from their course or in any way change their separate, dangerous trajectories. They seem to make no progress. The cynical might say they don't even move at all--that Magid and Millat are two of Zeno's headfuck arrows, occupying a space equal to themselves and, what is scarier, equal to Mangal Pande's, equal to Samad Iqbal's. Two brothers trapped in the temporal instant. Two brothers who pervert all attempts to put dates to this story, to track these guys, to offer times and days, because there isn't, wasn't, and never wil be any duration. In fact, nothing moves. Nothing changes. They are running at a standstill. Zeno's paradox."

21. (385)

"Yeah, Zeno had an angle. He wanted the One, but the world is Many. And yet still that paradox is alluring. The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage. Likewise, the brothers will race toward the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, emigres, travelers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow."

22. (390) "A radical new movement where politics and religion were two sides of the same coin. A group that took freely from Garveyism, the American Civil Rights movement, and the thought of Elijah Muhammad, yet remained within the letter of the Qur'an. The Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. By 1992 they were a small but widespread body, with limbs as far-flung as Edinburg and Land's End, a heart in Selly Oak and a soul in the Kilburn High Road. KEVIN: an extremist faction dedicated to direct, often violent action, a splinter group frowned on by the rest of the Islamic community; popular with the sixteen-to-twenty-five age group; feared and ridiculed in the press; and gathered tonight in the Kilburn Hall, standing on chairs and packed to the rafters, listening to the speech of their founder."

23. (437) Clara will still break out into patois after living in London for most of her life: "you kyan jus leddem sing trew de whole ting!"

24. Why Samad wouldn't stop Hortense and the Jehovah's Witnesses from singing to interrupt Marcus Chalfen's presentation of his genetically-engineered mouse

439) "Samad watches it all and finds himself, to his surprise, unwilling to silence her. Partly because he is tired. Partly because he is old. But mostly because he would do the same, though in a different name. He knows what it is to seek. He knows the dryness. He has felt the thirst you get in a strange land--horrible, persistent--the thirst that lasts your whole life."

25. (442) "So as the gun sees the light, he is there, he is there with no coin to help him, he is there before Samad can stop him, he is there with no alibi, he is there between Millat Iqbal's decision and his target, like the moment between thought and speech, like the split-second intervention of memory or regret."

26. (446) Dr. Sick: "It is not a serious proposition. It is a test. Only those who are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it--even if it will just keep on repeating--have what it takes to endure the worst blackness. I could see the things I have done repeated infinitely. I am one of the confident ones. But you are not one of them..."

27. (447) "But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story."

28. (448) "But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the  past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it's not like that. It's never been like that."

29.  (448) "Maybe it would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown man rebel mouse. Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie."

30. “Please. Do me this one, great favor, Jones. If ever you hear anyone, when you are back home...if ever you hear anyone speak of the East," and here his voice plummeted a register, and the tone was full and sad, "hold your judgment. If you are told 'they are all this' or 'they do this' or 'their opinions are these,' withhold your judgment until all the facts are upon you. Because that land they call 'India' goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same among that multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.” 

Interesting interview with Zadie Smith

http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/ogrady/zsmith2004.htm