Synopsis
‘Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is ... an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by White Teeth, and often impressed.’
Salman Rushdie
One of the most talked about fictional débuts of recent years, White Teeth is a funny, generous, big-hearted novel, adored by critics and readers alike. Dealing - among many other things - with friendship, love, war, three cultures and three families over three generations, one brown mouse, and the tricky way the past has of coming back and biting you on the ankle, it is a life-affirming, riotous must-read of a book.
White Teeth has won awards for Best Book and Best Female Newcomer at the BT Emma Awards (Ethnic and Multicultural Media Awards), the Guardian First Book Award, the Whitbread Prize for a first novel in 2000, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction 2000, the WH Smith Book Award for New Talent, the Frankfurt ebook Award for Best Fiction Work and both the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award and Overall Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Reviews
Customer Review: 11 February 2013
Reviewer: Narasing
'This is a good book.'
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Customer Review: 04 November 2008Critic Review:
Zadie Smith's fizzing first novel is about how we all got here - from the Caribbean, from the Indian sub-continent, from the thirteenth place in a long-ago Olympic bicycle race - and about what here turned out to be. It's an astonishingly assured debut, funny and serious, and the voice has real writerly idiosyncrasy. I was delighted by White Teeth, and often impressed. It has ... bite.
Salman Rushdie
Smith can write. Her novel has energy, pace, humour and fully formed characters; it is blissfully free of the introversion and self-consciousness details that mark many first novels. Smith has stories to tell and, in the tradition of Peter Carey and Salman Rushdie, she gets on with them; the dialogue is pitch perfect, the comedy neat and underplayed.
Daily Telegraph
White Teeth is ambitious in scope and artfully rendered with a confidence that is extremely rare in a writer so young. It boggles the mind that Zadie Smith is only 24 years old, and this novel is a clarion call announcing the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction. It is a raucous yet poignant look at modern life in London.
Bold Type Magazine
Interview
Zadie Smith talks about White Teeth, which was published to huge critical acclaim ...
Do you feel dizzy with success?
I feel a bit tired. I've got flea bites on my feet that are driving me crazy. I let some kitten from next door in the house for ten minutes and I got multiple fleabites and conjunctivitis in my right eye. I'm very allergic. Many of the countries that dizzying success have taken me to have also prompted allergic reactions. Certain foods, dusts, insects. It is my art: I suffer for it.
You've spent some time in Sydney and New York. How different did you find the literary scenes out there?
The Sydney literary scene I cannot comment on. The only scene I came to know was the MTV/room service scene and the gin and tonics in the lobby scene. Both of these were above average.
New York....ah, city of high-maintenance women, great cocktails and small lawyers with thyroid disorders...
I found the literary scene in NY absolutely remarkable, mostly because it wasn't the New York literary scene proper (bloated agents, teeny tiny canapes, old men grasping too many adjectives; the words martyrical and the phrase inextricably entwined; Prada-baby; the next-best-thing; the once-seen-thing; the-old-fat-thing; the old-fat-thing-with-a-Pulitzer) it was the NY scene of McSweeney's and Mr David Eggers. Everyone was my age, everyone was cute, everyone could really write, everyone could write funny. No lifestyle aspirational journalism disguised as fiction, no girls books and boys books - just good, funny writing. Readings that involved Evil Kenival costumes, James Brown capes, a live band, a rendition of Tomorrow from the musical Annie, and the smashing of acoustic guitars on stage.
Yes, folks, I had a lot of fun. And no-one wrote about it in the diary pages or made me eat one miniature Thai pancake with a ginger and chili dip.
White Teeth is very much grounded in memory and the past. What do you think of the New Puritans and their rejection of anything that isn't The Present?
The New Puritans are lovely folk one and all, but I think their project is about as misguided as marital chocolate advertising. The places where White Teeth sucks - and there are a load of them - it's not because of the flashbacks, guys. It's because the writing is over-indulgent, baggy and dishonest. But that's not metaphor's fault, that's MY fault. Don't blame metaphor. And don't go blaming non-linear narrative, decorative prose or worst of all - the imagination. Stories must contain as many real things as possible? Hmmm. Yeah. Good rule.
My thought is this: if you hate the writers of the 80's then do something different. Do something more streamlined, something more relevant. We all want to do that. But if you hate writing - if you hate the things that differentiate it from film and other seemingly more direct, more popular (and that's what this is about, really. It's about fame) mediums, then get into a different business. Becuase fame ain't nothing. It's the easiest damn thing in the world to be famous if that's all you want. It's hard to write well.
The stupid thing is, a lot of my interests align with the Puritans - my next book is about fame and film - but I'm not interested in rules of form masquerading as moral imperatives. I'm not interested in ascribing the smallest possible space for writing because some writer fifteen years ago couldn't control his sentences. The only thing I'm interested in is writing twice as well as - no, not even the next guy - as myself, last time. I know White Teeth dances about on the page, performs itself, concerns itself with writerly-ness instead of people, and is cold. It is cold. But I can fix that, I think. I keep on reading, I learn - it's all good. It may take twenty years, but I'm in this thing for the long haul. You have to be, don't you? I will write about the past when I feel like it. I will make language stretch, when it needs to, when it's called for, and yes, when it entertains. I reserve that right - every writer must. Because if you're willing to discount a book like Lolita for example, or Ballard's Crash because of the elaborate coils of their structures - well, then we're just going to have to part ways on that point.
Good writing is good writing, period. And how adolescent is it to believe that writing about the past is, in itself, conservative or retrogressive, that the actual literary form of flashback harks back to an older school of writing? You're kidding me, right? I don't have to write about what happened to me yesterday to be of the modern. Surely. I just have to write in a new space, in a new way. I don't feel I did that in White Teeth and so it's back-to-the-drawing-board time. But let's see if I can't get the kids to read it and enjoy it independent of any damn rules. Carver said the only morality writers have is the right words, carefully placed - I think we all agree about that. But there's more than one way to beat a cat (now - there's a metaphor).
What's meant most to you about the success of White Teeth - to see your book on the shelves, the prize nominations, or the fact that thousands of people are reading and enjoying your novel?
It kind of goes in waves. The first was just seeing the thing on a shelf. I'm still not over that. I still sneak into bookshops to look at it. I don't have any copies at home anymore - everyone nicked 'em.
The prize nominations are weird when they're so big and serious like the Orange and you feel a bit of a fool being nominated, a bit out of your depth - but they're excellent when it's something like the Guardian one which is for first books. Then you can think: yeah, I wrote a first book and you noticed. Cool! And more cool is the being with your peers, you know? And people whose books you really loved - the Eggers, Danielewski's House of Leaves, Klein's No Logo, these were some of my favourite books this year. In that line-up of 10, I'd have a tough time voting for me. So I'm really buzzed about it, and really hoping that the Americans turn up for the party.
What was the last one? Ok, people reading and enjoying. Yes, that's the best bit, I guess. It can get a bit teary my end if people - especially people over the age of 70 - write and say they like it. I don't really know what that old people thing is about. Does anyone else get that?
The BBC have bought White Teeth for a major drama series. How do you think it will feel to watch an interpretation of your novel on screen?
Oh, you know, cool. I love T.V. I'm sure it will rock. I can't really think about it seriously because it won't happen for years. I just wish I'd written more parts for handsome young men. It's just all these old guys.
Your writing is so different from current trends. What is your strongest inspiration?
Er... what current trends? There are no current trends - I think we're all just feeling our way at the moment. The chick-lit stuff etc is so last decade it's not even funny. I don't feel in opposition to anything - I know a whole load of great young writers who belong to no trend - trends are for the marketing department and critics, not writers. Great writers do their own thing, always.
Inspiration - I just read everything. All writers do the same thing. I'm like the rest of them.
White Teeth is very much grounded in London. Could you imagine living anywhere else?
I'm allergic to South London, no matter other cities or countries. I was tempted by New York, you know, in a misunderstood-author-moves-to-indulgent-city-where-everybody-loves-her type of way. But in the end, it's Kilburn for me. The Kilburn Massive forever.
Does being in the public eye make you feel boxed in - like suddenly everyone feels they own a piece of you?
Everywhere I turn they're grabbing, grabbing; tearing at my clothes, pulling at my hair, at my skin, always asking, asking, with those penetrating orbs, their eyes, pleading; what are you Miss Smith? What is the irreducible essence of Zadie?
No - of course it doesn't make me feel boxed in because it doesn't happen. I don't even get recognized in the garage at the corner of my street. The thing is, a) celebrity is controllable and b) I'm not a celebrity. Lemme eggsplane: I went to a party with Harrison Ford in New York [I had to tell you that. What's the point of meeting these people if you can't tell everyone?] We walked down the street and everyone who walked towards us looked like they were going to have a heart-attack. That's celebrity. Almost giving people coronaries is what fame is all about.
(What's he like? Very nice. Into park-planning. I did my final year dissertation on 18th Century garden design so we talked about that. That's another good thing about this business - actors love to meet writers. And all you've got to do in return is act like it's no big deal meeting actors. You know, like; "Harrison... Ford, Ford, Ford...now which one was he?" when inside you're going: JESUS CHRIST I'M WALKING DOWN CENTRAL PARK WEST WITH HAN SOLO. That sort of thing)
Is writing a middle class occupation?
ig buguloo piklty ahgdyahj juga juga typy typy aaaaagh. Er, maybe. No. Probably. I wasn't middle-class, but I am now 'cos I went to Cambridge and now I do this and I get paid all this money. Being middle-class...you know, it's ok. I always wanted to be middle class and now I am, and you know, it's nice. You get fresh juice, you get in cabs and you read the foreign news in the Grauniad. And you know to call it Grauniad because you read Private Eye. See? That's all very nice, isn't it?
How important is a room of your own?
Oh - you don't need me to tell you that. It's everything. For a woman it's even more important. She needs her own house (or at least a floor of a house).
What's your all-time classic novel, and why?
Ug Ug. Just one? It's a dumb question so here's a scattershot answer.
Novel - Pnin, Nabokov
Story - The Death of Ivan Ilyvich, Tolstoy
Poem - To His Coy Mistress, Marvell
Play - Henry V
The letters - Groucho Marx collected
The one I say to impress people but haven't actually read - The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil
The one I'm sure is great but I can't read - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez
The e-mail - First one sent to me by the writer, James Flint
The Flyer - for a club night in east Anglia, shows Julie Andrews and kids running across the Sound of Music mountains with a speech bubble coming from Julie that says Booyakasha
What do you read when you can't get to sleep at night?
A Room With a View - Forster. Or some porn (Story of O, Digital Diaries, random magazines)
Out of all the books you've read in the last year, which has stayed with you the most?
Oh, I can imagine what some will make of this, but it is probably "Experience" - Martin Amis. It got to me in a very fundamental way. Fathers, writing and death. The right book at the right time. I also read Carson McCullers' short stories for the first time. That rocked my world.
What are you reading at the moment?
Great tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult - edited by Joachim Neugroschem and various McSweeneys.
More
ANCHORESS
The neighbours think I'm a whore. I stay in all day, I wear nothing but a night-slip, sometimes men come bearing brown envelopes. I don't do any work yet I seem to have money. On the face of it, whore would be my guess too. Actually I'm a scribbler, all day in a room, not seeing anyone, just looking at this screen - I don't fuck the FedEx boys. I'm not an anchoress, either - though I remember once liking the idea. Cool to be a woman who's isolation is self-inflicted; a mystic retreating from the world for religious purposes. But I never had a purpose, religious or otherwise. I write for money and sometimes its more than that and sometimes it ain't, and there is no mystery to it, and I see no visions, no motherly Christs, or Goblets filled with blood. I don't hear voices. Julian of Norwich (c1343 - after 1416) heard God say All will be well...all manner of things shall be well. Julian was an anchoress and a mystic. She was certain that she knew God intimately. I don't know the man in the flat above me. I have no confidence that all will be well. I'm in the house all day half-dressed, sometimes I eat beans out of the can, occasionally I talk to myself - anchoress is a polite word for what I am.
BABEL/ THE BEASTIE BOYS
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech...And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven...And the LORD said, behold, the people is one and they have all one language; and this they began to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may no understand one another's speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad... - Genesis, Chapter 11
Clearly, this was meant to constitute some kind of punishment. But if you're going to go around confounding the language, you should be prepared for people to get creative with their little bit of it. So Shem Begat Arphaxad, and Arphaxad begat Salah and Salah begat Eber, and then somewhere down the line in New York someone begat MCA, Ad-Rock, and Mike D.
I'm a pistol-packing, monkey-drinking, no-money bum; I come from Brooklyn 'cos that's where I'm from. Hold it Now, Hit it. The Beastie Boys
Punishment, my eye. Anyone who writes a lyric like that has got to be on the side of the angels.
CHARAS
It's important to now the right word for things. Say hash and you say hash but somewhere somebody is using the mid-nineteenth century term charas and getting away with it. I'm not saying you have to use it, but next time you're getting stoned you might want to think about it, is all.
DEVIANT
It is not possible to overstate the importance of deviancy. The more accepting everybody gets, the more deviant you have to become.
ENTELECHY
Back when the idea of soul was fashionable outside of the R&B charts, Aristotle coined this term to describe the first actuality of a living thing - entelechy; the condition in which a potentiality has become an actuality; the essential nature or informing principle of a living thing; the thing that comes before the thing; basically, the soul. He explained himself through an analogy with knowledge: first actuality (entelechy) is to knowledge as second actuality is to the active use of knowledge. I like this idea of a primitive active force. It's the closest I get to a religious belief. I like the idea of force before brain and heart that we have stored up, which powers us like some hidden battery. I also like the idea that the editor of this magazine has given me free reign to reduce a complex philosophical idea I don't understand into an analogy for the Duracell bunny.
FREED, ARTHUR
Arthur Freed was a producer of musical motion pictures during the golden age of cinema, 1940-1955. He was one of the greatest. In those days, musicals were the biggest earners for the studios, and Arthur was given free reign over MGM and its many departments - the set designers, the orchestra, the choreographers, the actors, the composers, the lyricists, the screenwriters. It was his job to co-ordinate monumental fictions. It was Freed who ensured a whole replica town was built for Meet Me in St Louis. It was Freed who demanded Paris be made hype-real, painted every colour of the rainbow in Gigi. It was Freed who made it rain so consistently, so heavily, so unnaturally in Singin' In The Rain. Cinema wasn't about naturalism in those days. It was about the perfect recreation of ideal forms. Freed made total works of art. He was a conductor of diverse elements on a grand scale, a cinema-choreographer who understood that the money is as important as the violins which are as important as the punctuation which is important as the shoes the hero is wearing. Nothing is below a great artist, not even making the coffee (he did that too).
GIRLS, (PRETTY)
The power of a pretty girl... totally unquantifiable. But this much is certain: there is nothing a beautiful girl in the West cannot have, for a time. And I don't speak from any far off hilltop - I'm as much a sucker as anyone. I've risked everything for a certain look, for tapered fingers or a particular mole. So I hear you when you say it's not what she says, not what she does, that it's on her. It's something she wears and however skin deep it may be on her, it penetrates you right to the marrow. Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. I think about them. Sometimes I want them and sometimes I worry about them - even though it's not my business to do. I wonder about them. I wonder if you are the pretty girl in question. I wonder what you do with a power which, though potent, makes you vulnerable to every probe, every demand, every infiltration? I wonder what you do with a power that turns you into an open atlas upon which any idiot can map their own route?
HEDLEY
Names are essential. Hedley is a great name for a character. Other favourites: Rubenstein, ira, Clive, Janice and Hampus Lindwall. But Hedley I inspired. So far I've never used it. It's almost too good to use. One day.
ICHABOD
In Samuel, 4:21, Eli's daughter-in-law names her son Ichabod, saying, The glory is departed from Israel. Ichabod is a disappointed word for disappointment. It's also, technically, an interjection. It's to be shouted whenever you feel Regret at former glories or higher standards (O.E.D). Ichabod! But its good as a noun, I think. England is an ichabod. My favourite kind of scribblers are ichabods. To be an ichabod is to be a nostalgia artist. Let the futurists do their thing, let the ichabods do theirs. Both are necessary. I have only known the meaning of the word ichabod for about two months, but long before I came across it in the dictionary, a friend and I used it as a noun to describe his uncle, a nice enough man who happens to have no neck. Only the very best words get used by instinct, without definition. It means that they are phonetically irresistible. And as it turns out, this neckless state is perfectly ichabodic(!); shoulders that had hoped for better, a head that fondly recalls a neck somewhere beneath the rolls of ft.
J________.
A first love. He was beautiful, but that wasn't it. He was bright and funny, but that wasn't it. He showed me how to sit on a gravestone and laugh my head off, but that wasn't it either. He didn't want me, that was it. You try and try for someone, and then, without realising it, in the striving you become yourself. People always ask musicians which bands influenced them, and directors which movies, sportsmen which champions. You get asked, who were the writers that...? It's hard to explain that before any other scribblers there was someone else. And he's still there, like a watermark in everything I do, in the paper somewhere, visible if you hold it up to the light.
KAIROS
Def. In the fullness of time, the propitious moment for a decision or an action. I like to write about folks who are looking for this moment, waiting for it, who pre-empt it, or fuck it up completely. Fate and Luck are other words for it, I guess, but to me it feels more like a science, or at least as much of a science as fishing - biding your time, pacing yourself. I can't fish.
LYING
A story a scribbler told me: Aged twelve years old, a child is instructed to take a shower she doesn't want. So she enters the bathroom and stages an elaborate lie; wets the floor, wets the towel, squeezes out some shower gel - even leaves wet footprints on the floor - all without getting in the actual shower. So much more trouble than a shower would have been. And this lie, though carefully executed, is not quite good enough. She is discovered, there is an almighty row, tears before bedtime. Father is yelling, mother is asking where she went wrong - and all the child can think is: But it might as well be true. The scribbler told me that every time he sits down in front of his Apple Mac, the same instinct runs though him. I don't know if this attitude is true of all scribblers, but maybe you want to avoid relationships with them in future, just to be on the safe side.
MATER DOLOROSA/MADDONA (CICCINOE)
Latin for Sorrowful Mother. The Mater Dolorosa is the weeping woman kneeling at the foot of the crucifix during the passion of Christ. To me, she is everything that is Womanish (as opposed to Feminine, which is a kind of elaborate stage show that should be reserved for Drag Queens.) Something in the Women at Christ's feet, something in their weeping and wailing, sucks the life out of him, kills him. And then, three days later, something in their weeping and wailing brings him back. As for Madonna, I love her; I've always loved her - ever since she danced by some lockers in the video for Get Into The Groove. But I've never loved her as much as I do now. And it's so amazing to watch her slowly and comfortably slide into the role of Mater Dolorosa, the woman you think might just suck the soul out of you, but also the woman who could just save your life. (Show a young man a recent picture of Madonna. Watch his face! Ten years ago, he thought he just wanted to fuck her. Now he's not sure if he wants to sleep with her or ask for motherly protection.)
NIGG(A)
Everybody knows that words win the war against sticks and stones, but who would have thought a word could be neutralized, de-commissioned - simply by subtracting two letters and adding one? I love this word. I put my full support behind it. And I don't know what gangsta rap is, I don't think it exists outside of certain broadsheets. What I know is a medium that has always taken whatever it could lay its hands on (half a set of turn-tables, a scratched record) and turned it into gold. So it is with Nigga. Some of my favourite tunes include it. I'd concede that it's still an unstable element, like uranium. It requires an experienced logodaedalist. It needs to be handled only by people who know what they're doing. But don't worry, Miss Burchill. Method Man knows what he's doing.
OUROBOROS
A snake (occasionally a dragon) swallowing its tail; the symbol for infinity. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, the 1000 page epistolary novel from hell, the evil Lovelace has it inscribed on the eponymous heroine's coffin. It would also make a pretty good tattoo.
PRODUCT PLACEMENT
To write this, I am using the Word 2000 package on a Packard Bell PC. Earlier in this A-Z, I mentioned the Duracell bunny. The word Duracell immediately capitalized itself. Bill must like Duracell. What else does Bill like? Bill likes Disney, Microsoft, and Odeon. He smokes Marlboro and is into Madonna (as a pop or religious concept - who can say?) though no Jesus or Christ of the good lord himself. Someone at Nintendo paid Bill some money, but Sega didn't. Silly Sega! Silly Nike and Reebok, too. Get with the program! Be Bill's friends like Cadbury's and the nice people at Goodyear tyres. Drink some Heineken with Bill and some Carlsberg but don't touch the Bacardi. Bill doesn't like it. He likes Hershey bars and Rothmans.
QUILTY, Dr CLARE
The very greatest of the literary bad guys. He has feminine handwriting. He has peculiar t's, w's and l's. He goes by pseudonyms:
Dr Gratiano Forbeson of Mirandola NY
A.Person, of Porlock, England.
Arthur Rainbow Morris Schmetterling
And many more. His is an evil that runs through all the best books, never quite revealing itself, loping in the shadows, just behind our hero. Quelque-part Island is one of his favourite residences. Humbert suspects him of being a repressed undinist (a man who is aroused by water, esp. urine).
RESEARCH
I don't do it, if I can help it. Research is for people with huge hulking frontal craniums. You've got to have the brain for it and the patience and a good university library. And once you've conceded, as Vonnegut did, that novelists, by and large, have about he same I.Q's as the cosmetic consultants at Bloomingdale's department store, you stop stressing about stuff like research. Leave it to people who know what they're doing.
SUSHI
God's greatest food.
TAP-DANCING
Much maligned Twentieth-century art form. Greatest practitioner: Fred Astaire. Kelly's good, but he's too ballet influenced. Some days, I would even put Donald O'Connor second, just for the Moses Supposes routine in Singin' in the Rain. If you're thinking of taking it up (it's good for fitness, too), make sure you get double taps on both toe and heel, and you go to someone who knows what they're talking about like the people at Freed's on St Martin's Lane. A bad, cheap tap-shoe will cause you nothing but misery and you'll never get a good sound out of it.
USURY
Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do until they've sunk five pints. I don't think anybody should give themselves air just because they don't have to hand over a pound of flesh every day at 5pm, and I don't think anyone should beat themselves with broken glass because they do. If you're an artist, well, good for you. Thank your lucky stars every evening and dance in the garden with the fairies. But don't fool yourself that you occupy some kind of higher moral ground. You have to work for that. Writing a few lines, painting a pretty picture - that just won't do it.
VONNEGUT, KURT
There aren't that many people who can open a volume of their own writing thus: This is a very great book by an American genius.
I came to Vonnegut very late in the day on the advice of my younger brother, and maybe you've all already read him, but if you haven't, do. The effect of Slaughterhouse Five on me was something akin to being doused in cold water at five in the morning, turned upside down and hung from a lamppost in the middle of a town square until dry. He is wakeup call, and also the best giver of advice imaginable He says: Any person who can't explain his work to a fourteen-year old is a charlatan.
He calls his genre Blitvit, a word he defines as the combination of fact and fiction. Otherwise known as two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag. I think I aspire to write Blitvit. When I went to New York recently, I spotted a listing advertising a reading Vonnegut was to give in a small Irish bar on the east side with a much younger writer, formerly homeless, whom he had befriended. I was out-of-my-mind excited. I got there early and got a spot near the front, but within twenty minutes there were a hundred people in a fifty person space, a physical Blitvit, if you like. Then the news went round that Vonnegut had banged his head, wasn't coming. Everybody left, including me. That poor ex-homeless guy had to read to an empty room.
WEED
Personally, I can't write on it. But I'm half-Jamaican. If I didn't give the weed at least two mentions in this A-Z I'd be arrested by the tourist board. Weed ... weed makes things ... slow. There's even a town in Jamaica called Wait-a-Bit. I have a postcard of their police station. Wait-a-bit Police Station, it says. I swear. To. God.
XEROX
Last time I was on a plane, a Virgin plane, I spent a nice flight watching my movie screen, eating the food, playing Mario Cart. When we landed I stood up, and saw in front of me a hundred movie screens, all playing the same image of a boy snow-boarding, all partly obscured by the empty trays of eaten food and drink bottles. All the time, I'd kidded myself I'd just had an experience of my own, private, exclusive to me. But in every seat throughout the airplane it had been Xeroxed, perfectly.
YWROKEN
I'm all about vengeance. I have stalked boys, I have phoned them at two in the morning, I have scared off their girlfriends, I have smashed their mirrors, ripped up their clothes and thrown their stereos down corridors. I don't know why, I just can't help it. I have never been able to hide a feeling. I have never been able to understand the principles of House and Contents Insurance. I have never been able to forgive anybody anything.
ZORA
A good name for a little girl, if you're having one. A good woman to name a little girl after. Zora Neale Hurston. One of those scribblers who feels like an old friend.
Product details
Format :
Paperback
ISBN: 9780140276336
Size : 129 x 198mm
Pages : 560
Published : 25 Jan 2001
Publisher : Penguin
Other formats for White Teeth:
» ePub eBook: eBook : £2.99
White Teeth
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