White teeth : a novel / Zadie Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Zadie.

Contributor:

Gotham Book Mart Collection (University of Pennsylvania)

Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books (University of Pennsylvania)

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Immigrants--Great Britain--Fiction.

Immigrants.

Social conditions.

Great Britain--Social conditions--1945---Fiction.

Great Britain.

Social history.

Genre:

Fiction.

Domestic fiction.

Novels.

Penn Provenance:

Gotham Book Mart (former owner) (Gotham Book Mart Collection copy)

Banks, Joanna (donor) (Banks Collection copy)

Physical Description:

14 unnumbered pages, 448 pages, 2 unnumbered pages ; 21 cm

Edition:

First Vintage International edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Vintage International, 2001.

Summary:

From the Publisher: On New Year's morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie-working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt-is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie's car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel. Epic and intimate, hilarious and poignant, White Teeth is the story of two North London families-one headed by Archie, the other by Archie's best friend, a Muslim Bengali named Samad Iqbal. Pals since they served together in World War II, Archie and Samad are a decidedly unlikely pair. Plodding Archie is typical in every way until he marries Clara, a beautiful, toothless Jamaican woman half his age, and the couple have a daughter named Irie (the Jamaican word for "no problem"). Samad-devoutly Muslim, hopelessly "foreign"--Weds the feisty and always suspicious Alsana in a prearranged union. They have twin sons named Millat and Magid, one a pot-smoking punk-cum-militant Muslim and the other an insufferable science nerd. The riotous and tortured histories of the Joneses and the Iqbals are fundamentally intertwined, capturing an empire's worth of cultural identity, history, and hope. Zadie Smith's dazzling first novel plays out its bounding, vibrant course in a Jamaican hair salon in North London, an Indian restaurant in Leicester Square, an Irish poolroom turned immigrant cafe, a liberal public school, a sleek science institute. A winning debut in every respect, White Teeth marks the arrival of a wondrously talented writer who takes on the big themes-faith, race, gender, history, and culture-and triumphs.

Contents:

Archie 1974, 1945

1: Peculiar second marriage of Archie Jones

2: Teething trouble

3: Two families

4: Three coming

5: Root canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal

Samad 1984, 1857

6: Temptation of Samad Iqbal

7: Molars

8: Mitosis

9: Mutiny!

10: Root canals of Mangal Pande

Irie 1990, 1907

11: Mis education of Irie Jones

12: Canines: the ripping teeth

13: Root canals of Hortense Bowden

14: More English than the English

15: Chalfenism versus Bowdenism

Magid, Millat, And Marcus 1992, 1999

16: Return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal

17: Crisis talks and eleventh-hour tactics

18: End of history versus the last man

19: Final space

20: Of mice and memory.

Notes:

"Originally published ... by Hamish Hamilton, London, and subsequently ... by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000"--Title page verso.

Local Notes:

Kislak Center Banks Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries in 2018 by Joanna Banks.

ISBN:

0375703861

9780375703867

1417626283

9781417626281

OCLC:

47096283