Streets and Transformation in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and “Stuart”

Abstract

FEW FIRST NOVELS HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED TO THE ACCLAIM that accompanied Zadie Smith's White Teeth in early 2000. Smith was only twenty-four years old; first publicity photos showed pensive writer with short hair and funky glasses. She had just completed her undergraduate studies Cambridge University, and, as daughter of English father and Jamaican-born mother, she was heralded as voice of new multicultural, multiracial Britain that White Teeth chronicles. novel circles around lives of three families: Samad and Alsana Iqbal, Bangladeshi immigrants with twin sons, and Archie and Clara Jones, EnglishWest Indian family with one daughter, who are linked in friendship forged when two fathers served together in Second World War; third family, Chalfens, are white Londoners, intellectuals and writers, whose eldest son attends same state school as others' children. Through conjunctures and contradictions generated by these character groupings, White Teeth explores such wide-ranging issues as history, racism, imperialism, generations, legacies of Empire, genetic manipulation, and contemporary urban spaces. Writing in Observer shortly after novel was published, Stephanie Merritt describes it as a broad, teeming, comic novel of multiracial Britain.1 Her fellow novelist Caryl Phillips commends White Teeth for pressing significance of issues Smith tackled. The plot is rich, he writes, at times dizzyingly so, but White Teeth squares up two questions which gnaw very roots of our modern condition: Who are we? Why are we here?2 In North America novel was received with equal enthusiasm. New York Times reviewer Anthony Quinn praises Smith's ability to inhabit characters of different generations, races and mind-sets and sums up White Teeth as an eloquent, wit-struck book.3 Later commentaries offered similar assessments; in 2006, Jonathan P.A. Sell notes:In tune with Zeitgeist, novel's fusion of 'dirty realist' aesthetics and social politics of multiculturalism was laced with savvy, times rollicking humour.4Writing early retrospective assessment in 2004, Bruce King calls White Teeth the publishing sensation of 2000.5 Summing up reception of novel, Tracey L. Walters writes:critics applauded Smith's ability address multiplicity of themes - religious fundamentalism, postcolonialism, hybridity aesthetics, and multiculturalism - in single novel, complemented by touch of humor.6In anticipation of novel's North American publication, Smith was invited by New Yorker magazine, perhaps most prestigious periodical venue for writer in USA, contribute short story their December fiction issue. result was Stuart, story that revisits fluid, multicultural, multiracial, intergenerational streets and squares of public spaces in contemporary Britain, but represents subtle and overt potential for violence lurking within these familiar sites. In Postcolonial London: Rewriting Metropolis (2004) John McLeod situates the exuberance and wit of Zadie Smith's White Teeth in set of emergent writings in which London is confident, cognizant of its transcultural past, optimistic, of creative energies nurtured from conjunction of different times and places in both city and self.7 In similar way, John Clement Ball draws on urban theorists Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennett highlight potential in city streets for productive disorder and intermixture, and for stimulating imagination roam in both familiar and 'previously unthought' directions.8 In Stuart, Smith depicts different London, one that is still full of creative energies, but with telling difference - these energies bristle with potential set off contingent and unexpected violence. Stuart begins with detailed description of daily activities on crowded urban street, in ways that are sometimes evocative of dazzling opening pages of Virginia Woolf s Mrs. …