White Teeth
Smith, Zadie
come from wiser forms of humanitarian intervention, and what Tony Blair calls "progressive wars'--wars fought less on grounds of realpolitik or national self-interest than "for a fundamental...
...I think of Hieronymus Bosch again...
...And in the background, always, is the mist of racism, overt or covert: "the oldest sentence in the world, 'if you ask me, they should all go back to their own....'" Smith attributes the range of her characters to "Books, books, books...
...Samad owes something to Michael Ondaatje's (The English Patient) Indian soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II...
...How should it redefine the diplomatic role played by the secretary general and his deputies...
...To the pure all things are pure...
...While he wrote about many sports--including boxing and horseracing-Smith's primary subject was baseball...
...In dutifully chronicling the woefully mixed record of humanitarian intervention and peacekeeping, Deliver Us from Evil seeks to stir hope for meaningful reform in the way we pursue peace...
...Archie marries Clara, an attractive Jamaican (and as a consequence is no longer invited to company banquets...
...Millat Iqbal: "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster...
...Compared to their iridescent prose and inventive, anguished meditations on history, love, evil, and God, White Teeth is slight...
...In this first novel, Zadie Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant to Britain, continues the enterprise of giving us the view from the margins, as she sweeps Jamaican and Bangladeshi immigrants into mainstream literature in English...
...Its exuberant high jinks can remind one of Rushdie's pyrotechnics...
...He returns seeing God "in the millionth position of pi, in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox...
...The novel ends with a bang, the major characters unsatisfyingly and irritatingly freezeframed in medias res...
...I don't have time to go to Mecca...
...The author leaves such questions hanging in the air...
...White Teeth is technically inventive, a refreshing original...
...he can't help it...
...it's just a filler like beans or peas," she explains...
...come from wiser forms of humanitarian intervention, and what Tony Blair calls "progressive wars'--wars fought less on grounds of realpolitik or national self-interest than "for a fundamental principle necessary for humanity's progress: that every human being, regardless of race, religion, or birth, has an inalienable right to live free from persecution...
...When Marcus Chalfen, an eminent scientist, seeks to patent his genetically engineered FutureMouse, the many groups on the loony fringe of this panoramic novel-black Jehovah's Witnesses, Islamic fundamentalists, radical animal rights activists--converge in outrage...
...Commonweal 2 7 August 11, 2000tice, into Macaulay's "brown-skinned Englishmen, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect...
...Samad Iqbal, who becomes a waiter after the war, wants desperately to wear a placard saying, "I am not a waiter...
...Near the end of his career, he joined the New York Times...
...This edgy, hip, funny novel does for today's London what Salman Rushdie did for Bombay in Midnight's Children, or Dickens and Thackeray did for their more homogeneous city...
...They burn Rushdie's Satanic Verses...
...Smith captures the dialogue of London's contemporary tribes...
...It is the rare writer who can mix the humor, nostalgia, and intelligence that good baseball writing requires...
...She is certainly familiar with the multicultural canon, the best thing to emerge from the rapacity and crimes of slavery and colonialism...
...Don't let the flood of ink spilled on the subject fool you...
...It's not fair...
...Her characters cut their teeth on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the books of Alice Walker...
...The sprawling novel covers Smith's life, commencing in 1975, the year of her birth, a device borrowed from Rushdie who set Midnight's Children in 1947, the year of his birth...
...We meet, skewered on Zadie Smith's Bosch-like canvas, Indian lesbian feminists, topless hippies in a commune, and teenagers wriggling in anomie and angst...
...This volume is a collection of columns from 1947 to 1982...
...Though he quotes Annan, approvingly, to the effect that the United Nations, if given the means, could break these cycles of violence, Shawcross fails to identify the precise role of a chastened and more effective UN...
...Irie Jones (whose name means, in patois, "everything OK, cool, peaceful"), battles with "the bird's nest of her hair," and her weight: her body has "brown bulges for children, bags of fruit, buckets of water, ledges genetically designed with another country in mind...
...For a rambunctious and quirky take on our modem cities in their color and diversity, the melting pot simmering and boiling, we could do worse than turn to the dark eyes, pressed against the window, eyeing the party within with wistfulness and scorn...
...Does it accumulate the military might necessary to reduce or eliminate its dependency on nation-states...
...At first blush, Red Smith seems to come from the Will school of baseball writing...
...Samad's marriage is arranged to Alsana, who can kick and punch her husband with a ferocity that matches his own...
...Efforts to build a coalition of nation-states willing to fight "progressive wars" might merit and attract the support of Catholics committed to the church's defense of human rights and support of the UN, its challenge to developed nations and especially the United States to assume moral leadership, and its abhorrence of wars and the unimaginable human suffering they cause...
...Like Will, Smith is known for the erudition he brought to his work...
...Samad Iqbal: "Can't say fairer than that...
...A UN-friendly version of the Clinton Doctrine might deserve to have the loopholes eliminated, the double talk dropped...
...When the Dodgers and the Giants left New York in 1957, he quoted Robert Browning: "Just for a handful of silver Commonweal 2 8 August 11, 2000...
...After continual scrapes with white women and authority, Millat finds his clan in KEVIN, Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, militant immigrants with "an acronym problem," hate and anger and revenge seething beneath the shibboleths of orthodoxy...
...her in-laws speculate that her family has "some funny mental history...
...Many of her characters are flat, one-dimensional, almost caricatures, their inner lives reduced to blurbs...
...We encounter twins forcibly cleft by the corrupt older generation as in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things...
...In the columns gathered here, he throws around words like "ennui," "elan," "celerity," "phlebitic," and "riposte" like an SAT test-prep instructor...
...He drives points home with literary references...
...Kinsella) or too serious (see political columnist George F. Will...
...I've got to go to school...
...Smith limns the sadness of the immigrant experience in which, for the first generation, dreams steadily shrivel...
...Meanwhile Magid's twin, handsome Millat Iqbal, is trouble, an exemplar of the predicted decline and fall of Western civilization...
...Anita Mathias's essay, "I Was a Teenage Atheist," appeared in the October 8, 1999 Commonweal...
...I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier...
...His most recent book is The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Rowan & Littlefield...
...The children of these two couples, Irie Jones, and the twins, Millat and Magid Iqbal, are strangers in a strange land...
...Magid is returned to Bangladesh "to be brought up proper" by his grandparents, where he eerily turns, in a twist of poetic jusR. Scott Appleby teaches history and directs the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame...
...In the end, Smith is no Rushdie, or Toni Morrison...
...Smith, however, is something of a multicul~ral Garrison Keillor, and her snappy novel is delightful, hilarious, and interesting, a good companion for what remains of these hammock and deck chair days...
...Does the ultimate contribution of the UN lie in forging dynamic educational and civic partnerships with nongovernmental, intergovernmental, cultural, and religious organizations...
...Her relentless sly wit, however, can be wearing and remind you that Smith is only twentyfive...
...VIEW FROM THE MARGINS Anita Mathias o-called mulficultural literature in many ways extends the enterprise of the early feminist writers: "the custodians of the world's best-kept secret:/ Merely the private lives of onehalf of humanity," as Carolyn Kizer put it...
...Red Smith (1905-82), a graduate of Notre Dame, is considered by many to be the dean of baseball writers...
...And what more is God than that...
...Raindrop: Ocean...
...He got his start as a beat reporter who covered the Saint Louis Browns and worked his way up to nationally syndicated columnist for the Herald Tribune...
...The history it recounts, however, provides precious little warrant for optimism...
...Shawcross does not help much in evaluating such possibilities...
...Magid Iqbal, a freak genius, "given a glorious name like Magid Mahfooz Murshed Iqbal," wants instead to be called Mark Smith, and attend the Harvest Festival at school "like some wood sprite," instead of accompanying his father to Mecca...
...Needle: Haystack"-and Samad Iqbal--a Bangladeshi tom between Allah, alcohol, and women...
...Much of the plot hinges on the cultural and generational conflicts that spiral when their school's at-risk program subjects Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones to being mentored by the third family at the nucleus of the book, the liberal Jewish Chalfens...
...Most baseball writing alternates between being too weepy (see novelist W.P...
...The F-word acts like padding to him...
...It's not fair...
...I'm thinking of the New Yorker's Roger Angell...
...White Teeth is the saga of World War II buddies, Archibald Jones--a self-effacing Englishman "whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach...
...I can't go on haj...
...IN A LEAGUE OF HIS OWN Maurice Timothy Reidy ~ riting about baseball isn't easy...
Vol. 127 • August 2000 • No. 14
