That review was written by Smith herself.Ĭentring on an unlikely friendship between white, workingclass Archie Jones and Bengali immigrant Samad Iqbal, White Teeth opens with Archie attempting suicide early in the morning on New Year’s Day, 1975. The novel received only one dissenting review: this appeared in a small literary magazine called Butterfly and described the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired tap-dancing 10-year-old’. White Teeth is audacious, ambitious, and optimistic: absolutely the right book for its time. Londoners might not have been queuing for the Millennium Experience, but we weren’t yet disillusioned with Tony Blair’s government, its rhetoric of social inclusion and the black hole between its principles and its practice. London was prosperous: a place where people from a variety of backgrounds could mix it up and make it. The Y2K bug hadn’t caused ATMs to implode as the twentieth century ticked into the twenty-first, Britain was between wars, the Chancellor was predicting an end to boom-bust cycles and stock markets around the world hit all-time highs as the dot.com bubble continued to expand. Young, brilliant, beautiful and mixed race, Smith was the perfect image for an optimistic London at the start of a new millennium. Commentators and readers alike were beguiled by the novel’s exuberance, intelligence and superb prose as well as the way the author captured the spirit of the age. Written when its author was twenty-one and published, in 2000, when she was twenty-four, Zadie Smith’s debut novel was an instant critical and popular success.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine: Guignol's Band I & II John Sommerfield: Trouble in Porter Street Pamela Hansford Johnson: This Bed Thy Centre

2000 zadie smith novel