Author Purposeful With Prose, Fidgety With Fame

Staring at the face of it, Zadie Smith is none too pleased.

She’s not thrilled about all this hurtling back and forth across time, ocean and continents. Nor was she overjoyed to learn that she can’t smoke in her Beverly Hills hotel room--or anywhere for that matter in this too sunny and strange take on a metropolis.

Nor is she happy to be caught--pinned and wriggling--at the center of curiosity’s storm. Talking about herself, about her work, what it means--all this fuss of a book tour is testing not her mettle but her patience.

“It’s just like holding your breath for two weeks and just not thinking about it. You can do anything for two weeks. You can be on a chain gang,” Smith announces, in one motion plopping her laptop on the hotel side table and cocking her head toward her friend and traveling companion, Margaret Loescher, who is documenting the trip on videotape--less as memento than as evidence.

Grim words from a woman whose expansive, joyous first novel, “White Teeth” (Random House, 2000), throws clever sparks and unexpected spikes of humor. The book takes a fresh look at life’s many social intersections and collisions--racial, religious, generational--with a roll of the eyes or a knowing wink. Smith, however, is ingesting it all--and the subsequent onslaught--with caution.

Already, the 24-year-old north London native has been dubbed the literary heir to Charles Dickens, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie (who offered a glowing back-cover blurb). Her reviewers have, for the most part, found nary a nick in her prose.

Smith, however, possesses a bit of a bite. She’s prickly as a blooming succulent--if you want to inspect the flower close up, do so with trepidation.

Her thorniness reads as impatience. It belies her casual exterior--the high-heel slides, low-slung faded jeans and slightly rumpled shirt. Even at rest, her entire countenance appears to fidget--as if constantly working to find a comfortable position in the tiny space allowed.

It’s just that all of this is already a bit of a bore. And Los Angeles is just halfway through . . . the 13-city book tour. “I’m going to get online here,” she announces, after making a quick call to room service for smokes (thankfully, there is a balcony). “But carry on!”

*

Smith began “White Teeth” while a student at Cambridge. “I had a little spare time on my hands,” she explains, fingers flying across the laptop keypad. “Most of it must have been written just up to exams and after exams. . . .” It’s just that, she clarifies, “my memories of that time are obscure.”

What emerges is that a publisher who had read a short story of hers asked her to come to see him when she had something more. She offered him some of the novel’s early draft; he offered her a small sum. She was ready to accept until a friend suggested she find an agent.

She did. Shortly thereafter, the book sold at auction for about $400,000. Published in England in January (and here last month), “White Teeth” became an instant bestseller on the shoulders of its tremendous pomp. There is a BBC miniseries in the works. And Smith’s bespectacled image has stared out from the newsprint of papers across the globe.

In a market where many first authors turn inward, Smith opens her arms wide, grabs at the universe. Spanning nearly 500 pages and 150 years, “White Teeth” chronicles, in a distinctly modern voice, the baroquely entwined lives of three unique families.

She moves eloquently from race and class to genetics, gender politics and pop culture--without hesitation or the heavy-handedness of the clunky “we are the world” morality tale. The book is much smarter than that.

But the wisdom many reviewers are extracting from it wasn’t quite Smith’s intent.

Setting her book in Willesden Green, a multiracial/multiethnic neighborhood in north London, explains Smith, “I wasn’t trying to write about race. I was trying to write about the country I live in.”

It’s Archibald Jones, her Everyman anchor protagonist, who, however, puts it best: “[Archie] kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace and harmony or something.” And it’s that “or something,” that sense of offhandedness, that powers the book.

The neighborhood’s network--the lyric clip of accents, the mosaic of personal histories--is the Technicolor of “White Teeth.” There is Archie, a white Londoner and “direct-mail specialist,” who, at first sight, falls head-over-heels for Clara, a 6-foot Jamaican and lapsed Jehovah’s Witness. There is Samad Iqbal (Archie’s old war pal), a proud and passionate Bangladeshi whose career path is as stunted as his war-withered hand. And there is Samad’s wife, Alsana, who accessorizes her saris with running shoes and a kente headdress borrowed from Clara.

But their children--Irie Jones and the Iqbal twins Millat and Magid--find their lives becoming more enmeshed as they begin to carve out their identity. Not just as people of mixed race or expatriates, but as a complex amalgam reflecting London in the late 20th century.

This sophisticated, more inclusive point of view is what makes “White Teeth” a particularly fresh turn, says writer Nina Revoyr, author of “A Necessary Hunger” (Simon & Schuster, 1997), a novel that eloquently explored those same cultural and racial intersections in Los Angeles.

“It’s completely natural in her world that there are people of different colors, religions or sexual orientation. She’s not colorblind, but she doesn’t let race or religion obscure the fundamental humanity between them. There is no sense of tokenism. Her vision of the world includes all kinds of people. It’s very clear to me that race isn’t the subject, people are.”

This sense of fluidity, of life as a “social chameleon,” is what sets Smith apart from writers who write about race. Instead of looking at the skin, she’s looked at the sidewalks, the streets, and has written about what proximity has created--good and bad, frustrating and functional. As the clear-eyed, pragmatic Alsana advises the dreamer Clara, Smith’s tack with this book has been, “Look at the thing close-up.”

*

Those cultural collisions point up an issue often sidestepped--that the melting pot has long been an imperfect metaphor, and that constructing identity is less about shaving away (melting down) than it is about understanding how to “add on” and the complications implicit in that task.

Smith, who is biracial--her father is English, her mother Jamaican--doesn’t spend a lot of time retracing the rules, so there is freshness and expansiveness to her vision. And the limit lines drawn around thinking make her fidgety.

“Race is obviously a part of the book, but I didn’t sit down to write a book about race. The ‘Rabbit’ books by [John] Updike,” Smith says, plucking up a prime example, “I could say that that is a book about race. It’s a book about white people. It’s exactly a book about race as mine is. It doesn’t frustrate me. I just think that it is a bizarre attitude. So is [it that] a book that doesn’t have exclusively white people in the main theme must be one about race? I don’t understand that.”

Smith’s work upsets the model, sends it crashing to the floor. Like authors Revoyr and Junot Diaz, a Dominican-born, New Jersey-raised writer whose 1996 sharp-focused collection of life-in-two-worlds short stories, “Drown” (Putnam), astonished the publishing world, Smith is expanding the frame.

As writers, says Diaz, “we are often used to maintain narratives that have nothing to do with us and obscure real problems. We are living a new terrible reality . . . one that not enough of us are tackling. In generating [a] new narrative, we will need to see our situation clearly.”

“White Teeth” doesn’t celebrate the triumph of the individual, but rather what survives and blooms in collaboration--unwitting and otherwise. Her broad canvas challenges the narrow territory of the personal story. “I think that there is an absolute tyranny in modern culture about people’s personal experience--that if you felt it, it must be important or real. I don’t really care about people’s personal experiences. My concern is in themes and ideas and images that I can tie together--problem-solving [from] other places and other worlds.”

It’s in part why she’s put off by all the commotion. She’s concerned that personality--namely her personality--will overshadow the message, the work itself, when there is so much else at stake. “If people are fixated with me, they aren’t going to get very far,” says Smith, “I’m not the commodity; the book is.”

This, says Diaz, who after the success of “Drown” also found himself derailed by the onslaught, “is where it gets tricky.” He understands the armor. “Writers . . . can fall to temptation. They can grow arrogant. They can lose the underdog edge that propelled them forward in the first place.”

*

It’s important, says Diaz, always to keep in mind the climate and the context. “The European press and the U.S. press are far more eager to welcome a riotous book about immigrants than they are the immigrants themselves. . . . I believe that Ms. Smith’s book is being viewed in much the same way as certain desirable immigrants are being viewed by the country in which they have arrived . . . as a welcome addition--just don’t cause any trouble. . . . It’s important for us artists and activists to short-circuit these attempts to hold us up as examples of things going well, when things are not going very well.”

Smith hasn’t let much of it budge her off her course. And, if anything, all the fuss has only made her much more focused and self-protective. She just hopes that the messages embedded within “White Teeth”--cautionary as well as celebratory--shine through.

“But,” says Smith, with the first trace of a wry smile, “to speak personally for a moment . . . one of my most wishful things [is] . . . I’d love to speak the language of the [different] people who live [in London]. To be able to go inside a shop and order something and surprise the hell out of them! But you say that to some people in England it is like their worst nightmare--that anybody English should partake in a culture which they see as a kind of invasion . . .”

She pauses, considering the changing face of the world as she knows it, those serious eyes behind the spectacles locked in focus. “I don’t see immigration as an invasion. . . . I see it as a gift. It’s obviously a good thing that people spend more time in each other’s lives. And anybody who doesn’t think that is . . . well . . . it doesn’t matter what they think because they are swimming against the tide anyway. And they’re lost.”