White Teeth Novel Post
I've written, deleted, and re-written the opening to this post several times, never finding words that bear any semblance of how I feel about this novel--my opening line always ended up as an all top simple tribute to Zadie Smith or 'This is the best book ever-'--but I honestly don't know of a way to permeate the pages of this book without some sort of recording of what is has meant to me. Not only has White Teeth been my favorite novel of the summer, it has quickly become one of my favorite reads ever. We find so many authors of the past decades (from E.M. Forster onwards) announcing the death of the novel, declaring its inability to capture the essence of what the world has become, and for me, White Teeth became one of those often sought after (but rarely found) refutations of this 'death-of-the-novel' sentiment. It has affirmed for me that the novel is alive and well; it, like many genres, is still a thriving form with exceedingly unimaginable moments of brilliance. Nowhere in White Teeth do these changes of the novel become more in apparent than in its structure. While I found nearly every aspect of Smith's masterpiece incredibly intellectually stimulating and emotionally engaging, my favorite moments of the book share something in common: they are all moments when Smith actively 'breaks away' from traditional paragraphic structure. Paragraph structure is always that key indicator of prose (and thus, often of the novel form)--so I'm incredibly interested in expanding the definition/form/structure of the novel to include this conscious shifts from what may have previously been considered to be the very factors that actually determine a work's status as a novel. One of my favorite examples of these shifts occurs within the first few pages of the novel. While actively contemplating suicide, Archie recognizes his 'significance in the Greater Scheme of Things' along the following 'familiar ratios':
Pebble: Beach
Raindrop: Ocean
Needle: Haystack (10).
Smith's departure from the paragraph with these abbreviated comparisons (a simple colon replaces the phrase 'is to', a line break replaces the word 'as') was not something I could recall remembering from other novels. Even other proclaimed 'post-modern' novels with which I am familiar have not escaped the paragraph, a possible narrative trap.
If this initial detour still seems to function as traditionally ‘literary’ and text-based, there exist a plethora of more visual examples in Smith’s text. On page 49, Smith illustrates the placard Samad desires by physically boxing it in and separating it from the rest of the text. Images of family trees, depictions of the ‘before and after’ advertisement found by Irie, other lists comparing the tastes of Millat and Alsana all diverge from the most-travelled narrative path. Whatever this change of style may be attributed to, be it changes in print technology, a product of post-modernism or what have you, these paragraphic breaks rejuvenated my enthusiasm for the novel. In departing from tradition, they call attention to the tradition itself, seemingly quietly commenting on the history of the novel and more directly addressing the literary audience.
posted by PatrickMcKelvey @ 6:51 AM
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