How Zadie Smith Lost Her Teeth

Since her audacious debut, the author has been moving toward character-driven realism. In the process, she has become the least interesting version of herself.

- By Andrea Long Chu

ZADIE SMITH'S FIRST book, White Teeth, was the English comic novel on bath salts. Published to universal acclaim in 2000, it loosely centered on the Iqbals and the Joneses, two zany families living in Willesden Green, the diverse North London neighborhood where Smith grew up. Her madcap creations lost their teeth, fucked twins, gave birth during earthquakes, predicted the end of the world; there were Irish pubs owned by Iraqis, genetically modified mice, and an Islamic fundamentalist group named KEVIN. ("We are aware,' said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, 'that we have an acronym problem.") All the while, one never lost sight of Smith herself, bursting with exuberance and sincerity. Critics celebrated her for breaking "the iron rule that first fictions should be thin slices of autobiography, served dripping with self-pity," even as the author's biographical details-her age (24), her race (Jamaican mother, white father), her looks (good)would make her an object of fascination. "Is Britishness cream tea and the queen?" asked the New York Times. "Or curry and Zadie Smith?"

But Smith also had her critics. In an infamous review, James Wood dubbed White Teeth a work of "hysterical realism," arguing that Smith's characters, though they did possess a certain "shiny externality" reminiscent of Dickens, were "not really alive." For Wood, a passionate defender of the realist novel, this meant that