Such mild ribbing would today risk severe interrogation. It’s fun to read such cheeky lines, but it’s also poignant to realise how much more fraught things have become. Who delights in cramming as many special interest groups as possible into glorious sentences such as: “Both he and the paper received a ton of hate-mail from factions as disparate as the Conservative Ladies Association, the Anti-Vivisection lobby, the Nation of Islam, the rector of St Agnes’s Church, Berkshire, and the editorial board of the far-left Schnews.” Who feels comfortable poking gentle fun at Christianity, Islam and Rastafarianism alike. Talking of loss, imagine reading a book published in 2020, that contained lines like this: “Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it’s manmade.” (No English writer will be able to write again such a sentence for at least a century after Brexit, let alone the country’s handling of Covid-19.) Imagine also reading a contemporary novel so fearlessly multicultural, in which a young author feels entirely free to inhabit the heads of people of different sexes, races and religious persuasions, and to do so with joy and irreverence. There’s misunderstanding and alienation, sadness and loss. And as the blurb suggests, this can cause problems. The past – as the book keeps on reminding us – is always also in the present, even if we don’t quite comprehend what it is doing there.
The children of these immigrants, in turn, have little real feeling for the experiences and histories of their parents. Smith describes first-generation immigrants who look back on their old lives, and the lives of their parents in Bangladesh and the Caribbean, with a mixture of perplexity and fear. Smith is reminding us that the past is a foreign country, where things are done differently.
Eighties allusions fattened books such as The Northern Clemency and The Line of Beauty at the start of this millennium, but White Teeth is not just ramming in pop-culture.
White Teeth spans a period from the mid-1970s until the late 1990s (give or take a few excursions into the more distant past) – so the past the book describes is often closer to the time when Smith was writing than 2000 is to our own present. To read such nostalgia for old objects and customs, evoked with such enthusiasm, is haunting.
0 kommentar(er)
