WHITE TEETH
by Zadie Smith
(Random House) $24.95
If humor often acts as a shield to deflect, protect, or reflect something more
sinister, you could say that Zadie Smith brandishes her abundant wit as such
a weapon, disposing easily with any obvious feminism, racism, postcolonialism,
or other ism that might bounce off her formidable talent. At 24, wise beyond
her ever-so-slim years, Smith has churned out a riotous opus far beyond Cambridge
juvenilia, attacking the culprits of cultural purity and sultans of literary
tidiness with a sarcasm big enough to bite off the myriad immigrant experience
of North London and render it alive, hip, and bombastic. No wonder everyone
from Salman Rushdie to London hipsters to aesthetes are so hot for Smith.
Dodging back to the close of World War II and the friendship stumbled upon
by Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, as they await a radio transmission in a nearly
empty Bulgarian town–after having survived an attack on their broken-down tank
simply because they wandered off for a drink while their mates were ambushed–Smith
jumps forward 30 years and entangles these unlikely heroes in an arranged Bengali
marriage on the one hand, and a love affair with a lovely recovering Jehovah’s
Witness on the other. The tragicomedy that ensues eventually brings us to their
children and to the real-world experience from which this novel surely springs.
Smith, Jamaican English herself, pries opens the divide between parents and
their children, who fly off into a maelstrom of religion, gangs, drugs, straightened
hair, Public Enemy, and a jangle of incidents and culture fires that their parents
can hardly comprehend, let alone prepare them for. As Smith puts it: “It makes
an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection,
penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what
the immigrant fears–dissolution, disappearance.” It is this fear that Smith
both pushes and pulls out into the open. Perhaps a bit short on character and
pathos, White Teeth nonetheless heralds the arrival of a most fearless
gunslinger of the highest order. FIONN MEADE
Smith reads Tues June 20, 5 pm at Elliott Bay Books, 101 S Main St, 624-6600,
free advance tickets.
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF DOGS
by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
(Simon & Schuster) $24
Last year I read an article in The New York Times about the invention
of neuticles. Neuticles are artificial balls for dogs. They come in two varieties:
cheap and expensive. The cheap ones are made of polypropylene and sell for $25
to $32 a set, depending on size (big is more). The expensive ones are made,
like the breast implants humans enjoy, of silicone. The expensive ones sell
for $80 to $129. They take about two to three minutes to implant. Their inventor,
Gregg A. Miller, who lives in a suburb of Kansas City and about whom one need
not wildly speculate, contends that neutered male dogs suffer “post-neutering
trauma.” De-balled dogs, Miller claims, “know they’ve lost an important body
part.” When Buddy, the First Dog of the United States, was neutered, Miller
sent a pair of neuticles (the big size, presumably) to the White House and received
a personal thank-you note from someone in the First Family.
That The Social Life of Dogs mentions neither the invention of this
important prosthetic nor the First Response to Miller’s gift is unforgivable.
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ previous book, The Hidden Life of Dogs, was
a bestseller. Perhaps that is why the thoughtful people at Simon & Schuster
were hoodwinked into publishing such a flawed book. If you have $24 to blow,
don’t buy this book–get a pair of neuticles and hire some big ol’ dyke to implant
them (after rendering them necessary) in the male of your choice. REBECCA BROWN
LOST AND FOUND
KEW GARDENS
by Virginia Woolf
Chatto & Windus ($24.95)
For those daunted by the muscular weight of The Waves or To the Lighthouse,
the re-released Kew Gardens is a shorter Virginia Woolf in full stride.
Kew Gardens is bite-sized Woolf, Woolf-Lite, but in length only. The
sentences themselves are still strong examples of Woolf’s ability to tangle
with words, cascade language, and create a rush of hard-hitting forward motion
as one syllable pushes against the next. “From the oval-shaped flower-bed there
rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves
half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with
spots of colour raised… from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat….”
A single moment in a garden becomes a vortex of ghosts, memory, lust, and ultimately
the entire lack of consequence as each human life fades to nothing. “Children
were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then… they wavered and sought
shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water… their voices went
wavering from them as if they were flames lolling from the thick waxen bodies
of candles.”
The publisher’s blurb describes Kew Gardens as “one of [Virginia Woolf’s]
best-loved stories,” making the work sound misleadingly heartwarming. The book
itself is constructed to be less imposing than an illustrated coffee-table book,
just slightly more in the hand than a child’s Little Golden Book. Writing is
on one side of each page only, the back left blank. Large text is surrounded
by abstract, organic ink drawings created by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell.
The original version of Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens was published
in limited edition in 1927 by Woolf’s own publishing house, Hogarth Press. The
content here is the same as the original, and there’s a luxury allowed by the
brevity; in this compressed garden meander, Woolf has poured her entire worldview–perhaps
even her suicidal impulses intertwined with her recognition of the richness
of living. MONICA DRAKE