Authors and Artists for Young Adults on Zadie Smith
British writer Zadie Smith has published only two novels: White Teeth, winner of two major literary awards and with over one million copies in print, and The Autograph Man. Smith burst into the international fiction scene with the publication of her debut novel, White Teeth, in 2000, and was immediately hailed as a new voice in British literature. The half-Jamaican Smith has since been lauded for her multicultural exploration in White Teeth, which was written during her years as an undergraduate at Cambridge University.
Smith grew up in Willesden Green, a multiethnic neighborhood northwest of London. Her English father and Jamaican mother divorced when she was fourteen years old. "I didn't always write stories when I was young," Smith admitted in an online interview with Bold Type Magazine. "I wrote some, but I've never been prolific. From the age of five to fifteen, I really wanted to be a musical movie actress. I tap danced for ten years before I began to understand people don't make musicals anymore. All I wanted to do was be at MGM working for Arthur Freed or Gene Kelly or Vincent Minelli. Historical and geographical constraints made this impossible. Slowly but surely the pen became mightier than the double pick-up timestep with shuffle."
Smith began writing White Teeth while attending Cambridge University. "The novel began as a short story which expanded," Smith told Bold Type Magazine. While in college, she regularly contributed short stories to the May Anthologies, an annual compilation of prose and poetry written by Cambridge and Oxford undergraduates. One of these stories later became the basis for White Teeth. That story caught the eye of a literary agent who wanted to discuss with its author the possibility of expanding the story into a full-length novel. Consequently, the agent secured for Smith a rumored 250,000-pound (approximately 400,000-dollar) advance, an extraordinary sum for a first-time author and an incomplete manuscript which contained only a plot synopsis and two chapters.
Publishes White Teeth
Addressing racial, cultural, and generational issues with wit and irony, White Teeth is the story of the "lifelong friendship between Archie, a white, working-class Londoner, and Samad, a Muslim from Bangladesh, with issues of race, religion, generational conflict and genetically modified mice thrown spicily into the pot," summarized Sarah Lyall in the New York Times Book Review. "Theirs is a relationship born of World War II, forged on a lie and nourished on the greasy eggs served at O'Connell's Pool House, which, by the way, is neither Irish nor a pool hall. In fact, nothing in their lives has turned out as it seemed it would," added Susan Horsburgh in Time. By its end, White Teeth exposes the dangers of labeling others and illustrates the universal striving to maintain self-identity in pluralistic contemporary society, despite cultural heritage or ethnic origin.
Critics were enthusiastic in their response to the book. "When Zadie Smith published her first book in Britain earlier this year, the press and literati agreed: the novel and the novelist were 'drop-dead cool,'" commented Jeff Giles in Newsweek. A Publishers Weekly critic called the book a "stunning, polymathic debut. . . . Smith's novel recalls the hyper-contemporary yet history-infused work of Rushdie, sharp-edged, fluorescent and many-faceted." A critic for the Economist found the work clever, continuing: "But lots of novels are clever, and what makes this one true and original is the way the comedy fizzes up through the characters. Dickens, not Salman Rushdie, comes to mind, with all his theatricality and exuberance."
Though Giles felt that the plot is "tortured" and the work as a whole has too many characters, he lauded Smith as an "astonishing intellect. She writes sharp dialogue for every age and race--and she's funny as hell." Anthony Quinn in the New York Times Book Review, wondering if Smith has taken on a task beyond her reach with White Teeth, found that "aside from a rather wobbly final quarter, Smith holds it all together with a raucous energy and confidence that couldn't be a fluke." "Imagine Charlie Parker with a typewriter, Coltrane with a laptop," wrote Greg Tate in Village Voice. "Incredibly enough, Smith just might be even smarter than her smackdown writing declares her to be."
With the success of White Teeth came international media attention, something Smith is uncomfortable with. She told Malcolm Jones in Newsweek: "I remember once being in the street in London and watching a bus go by with my face on it, when White Teeth had just come out, and the way that made me feel. It was a sort of mixture of pumped-up, false power, vanity and terror. And to multiply that, and to actively want it in your life, seems to me horrifying. It's about the emptiest thing on this planet, and I wanted to write about that."
Examines Limits of Fame
The public's obsessive interest in celebrities is one of the subjects in Smith's second novel, The Autograph Man. Alex-Li Tandem, half-Jewish and half-Chinese, is a dealer in the autographs of famous people. He is on a quest to find the autograph of his favorite screen star, Kitty Alexander, but she is retired now, reclusive, and was always reluctant to give out autographs. Once a week, Alex writes a letter to Kitty's fan club, hoping she will someday respond to his pleas. As time goes by without a response, Alex's obsession leads him to increasingly erratic behavior, including the sorting out of all behavior by whether it is "Jewish" or "Goyish." Among the novel's other characters are Alex's girlfriend Esther, his two closest childhood friends--now a rabbi and an insurance salesman--and Adam, a black friend who combines Jewish mysticism with marijuana. "Smith's lively, descriptive prose drives a comic plot of labyrinthine complexity," wrote Shannon Olson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A Kirkus reviewer found the novel to be "an uneasy mix of [the film] Sunset Boulevard, J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, and James McCourt's fey romantic comedies about dementedly self-absorbed beautiful people." But Brad Hooper in Booklist concluded that Smith's second novel is "as bracingly intelligent and humorous as her first."
In The Autograph Man Smith paints a portrait of a society in which racial, religious, and ethnic distinctions are confused. "Smith likes to trample over the usual delimiters of identity," Laura Miller wrote in Salon.com, "on her way to portraying a new kind of mongrel world citizen: little bit of this, little bit of that." A critic for Publishers Weekly noted: "Smith paints portraits of a very multiculti Judaism: Adam, for instance, is a black Jew, while Alex is a disbelieving Chinese one." "His unusual ethnicity aside, Alex is a safe choice for a character," explained Daniel Zalewski in the New York Times Book Review. "He is the prevailing stereotype of his generation, the pop-culture-addled trivialist." Don McLeese in Book pointed out that "Alex is Smith's English Everyman, his ethnicity more matter-of-fact than life-defining." Sean Rocha of Library Journal concluded that "the novel's real pleasure lies in the masterfully crafted characters and the small insights that capture something so true of the world that they make the reader sit up in startled recognition." McLeese summed up: "Smith remains a virtuosic master of voices, a stylist who can be both playful and profound."
Smith told Jones in Newsweek that, with the publication of The Autograph Man, she intended to take a break from novel writing. In the fall of 2002, she enrolled in graduate literature classes at Radcliffe: "I'm enormously ambitious about being a part of English writing. But I don't feel as though I've written a book that has even a long shot of doing that."
This is the complete article, containing 1,258 words
(approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).
