This is a book which comes with bags of hype. Like a fledgling supermodel spotted in the street by a scout, 80 hand-written pages of Zadie's Smith's novel were sold for £250,000 when she was a scrap of 22. Two years later, White Teeth is on the shelves, with the double entendre endorsement "It has bite" from Salman Rushdie.
Smith is half Jamaican, half British, and her first novel, which commutes across the decades of the late 20th century, explores with grit and wit what happens when hugely different cultures collide with a hybrid generation down the line.
At the core of the book is the enduring friendship between Jewish Archie Jones and Muslim Samad Iqbal, from Bangladesh; their wives, their three children, and the urban landscape of the North London community in which they all live. Two-thirds of the way through, the Chalfens family turns up: a hilarious, hermetically sealed, self-satisfied family unit which acts as a catalyst for the Jones and Iqbal children. At 462 pages, White Teeth is a kind of Northern Hemisphere version of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet.
So, can Smith write? She certainly can. She changes style like someone trying out the gears in a fast car, and creates characters that lodge straight away in your head. She is sharp, moving, entertaining, and very smart. It's a long and ambitious book, particularly for a first novel, and will make many readers re-examine the meaning of that old cliche, "politically correct".
Smith is writing about the ethnic communities whom that furtive phrase could have been coined to tiptoe around, but she doesn't tiptoe round race-related issues; she stalks through them in the most refreshing and fresh manner, and leaves it up to you to decide what to make of it all.
Clear a space on your shelf if you like White Teeth: Smith is only 24, so there'll definitely be more books coming along to join this one.
Rosita Boland is a writer, journalist and critic
