Word: archieã
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...that simple. London’s strange, new ethnic milieu—the setting of Zadie Smith’s amazing first novel “White Teeth”—is rife with fear and uncertainty. A generation on the decline—Archie??s generation—retreats into an imagined past for comfort, while the next struggles with a seemingly divergent identity. With an acute sense of both the pathos and the humor of the modern immigrant’s lot, Smith crafts a narrative that entertains and evokes and succeeds in both...
...Connell’s Poolroom, Samad and Archie??s home away from home, represents the new Britain; neither Irish nor a poolroom, it’s owned by Abdul-Mickey, an Arab with bad skin whose family names “all sons Abdul to teach them the vanity of assuming higher status than any other man, which was all very well and good but tended to cause confusion in the formative years.” Abdul-Mikey adds the second—English—name as a sort of qualifier for the first...
Smith is at her parodic peak when depicting the characters’ cultural misunderstandings, and their casual racism. In a flashback where the pair are lost in a tank, waiting out a war, Samad and Archie??s talk inevitably turns to girls, specifically Samad’s unborn betrothed. This amuses Archie. “‘Where I come from,’ said Archie, ‘a bloke likes to get to know a girl before he marries her.’ ‘Where you come from it is customary to boil...
Samad and Archie??s stories, as well as the stories from their long-suffering young wives’ points of view, make up the first and best half of the book. But “White Teeth” changes once Smith takes up the mantle of the new generation, the products of cross-cultural fertilization. Smith provides a snapshot of Archie??s daughter Irie writing feverishly in her diary. Her depiction of overwrought adolescence is pitch-perfect: “8:30 P.M. Millat just walked in. He’s sooo gorgeous but ultimately...
...second youngest son, Archie??Class of 1917—was every roommate’s worst nightmare. “[At Harvard] he was a prude and a snitch, notorious for turning in students who enlivened their quarters with strong drink and sportive women,” O’Toole writes...