She’s young, black, British – and the first publishing sensation of the millennium
Stephanie Merritt
The hype began in late 1997. Zadie Smith was 21 and just down from Cambridge when her first novel was sold on a mere 80 pages for an advance rumoured to be in the region of 250 000.
Some two-and-a-half years on, White Teeth (Hamish Hamilton) is finished, at a weighty 462 pages. It is a broad, teeming, comic novel of multiracial Britain, and has already earned its author comparisons with Salman Rushdie and the kind of media attention not often lavished on a new writer.
Smith takes me to a caff in Willesden, north-west London, not unlike the one in which her two main characters, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, spend much of their time philosophising.
“I didn’t think the book would take two years to write,” she says, “but I was quite lazy. And I had moments of fear, of not being able to write anything.” Because of the advance? She laughs diffidently. “Partly that. It did make my life a bit ridiculous really – it made me scared that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the book, or that it wasn’t going to be any good. But in the end, you just have to forget about it; otherwise you’d never write a word. These things happen sometimes, these freak events in publishing. Next year it will happen to someone else.”
Smith, still only 24, is currently enjoying the kind of success that most novelists can barely dream of. As well as widespread publicity for the book, which has already been sold in eight countries, she was asked to write a short story for The New Yorker’s millennial fiction issue, and in April will travel to New York to take part in a literary festival organised by the magazine and to promote the American publication of White Teeth. She is also doing a stint as writer-in-residence at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London.
Despite all this, she is remarkably unassuming, quietly articulate though slightly shy about being interviewed, rolling cigarettes with nervous fingers and holding them, unsmoked, like a prop. She is modest, almost dismissive, about the book she has written, as if she genuinely didn’t realise how good it really is, and insists that she finds it “excruciating” to read. At the moment, she is still living with her Jamaican mother in Willesden, where she grew up, and where her novel is largely set.
“White Teeth is not really based on personal family experience,” she answers thoughtfully, when I ask if her own mixed- race background had furnished much of the story (her father is English). “When you come from a mixed-race family, it makes you think a bit harder about inheritance and what’s passed on from generation to generation. I suppose the trick of the novel, if there is one, is to transpose the kind of friendships we have now to a generation which was less likely to be friends in that way.”
She is referring to the book’s pivotal relationship, the 50-year friendship between Archie, a working-class Londoner, and Samad, a Bengali Muslim, whose ill-fated affair with a white woman proves a catalyst for the novel’s central events. I ask if she found it difficult to write in the consciousness of a middle-aged man, but Smith is unusually confident for a young writer.
“As long as you honestly believe that people can be, say or do anything, then you stop worrying about it. I worried about things that were objectively anachronistic, like whether you would find a pizza place in 1975, because that jars when you read it, but to worry about whether a Bengali man of a certain age might say or think such and such, well, that’s very limiting. You have to use your imagination.”
This imaginative element, I suggest, extends to the way in which race relations are portrayed in the book. Smith offers a very optimistic vision: prejudice exists, but tolerance appears in equal measure, and racist violence is only mentioned briefly and at second hand. Is this is an optimism she genuinely feels?
“It is kind of a fantasy book,” she agrees. “There is a lot of pessimism currently about race relations in this country. I think the relationships in the book are something to be wished for, but I think they might exist now, and certainly in the future, with the amount of mixing up that has gone on. My generation, and my younger brother’s generation even more, don’t carry the same kind of baggage.”
But racial prejudice is still a part of daily life in London. She tells me how her 16-year-old brother was stopped by the police: “He was just walking down the street and they thought he’d robbed a house or something, so they threw him up against the car, asked him if he had any weed on him. I think it is a completely different experience for black men in this country.”
Her own experience, she says, was always softened by her academic achievements, though she hints that this might have been through a desire to overcompensate in the face of prejudice. “When I was little, we’d go on holiday to Devon, and there, if you’re black and you go into a sweetshop, for instance, everyone turns and looks at you. So my instinct as a child was always to overcompensate by trying to behave three times as well as every other child in the shop. I think that instinct has spilled over into my writing in some ways, which is not something I like very much or want to continue.”
Several times, she mentions a desire to change the way she writes; admiring John Lanchester’s Mr Phillips, which she has just finished reading, she says: “The best thing about it is that it’s very sparse. I’d like a bit of that in my own writing.”
Smith is already well into a second novel, The Autograph Man, about which she will say little except that it is about Jewish cabbalism and is “much funnier” than White Teeth, which she doesn’t consider particularly funny (though it is). She wants to continue to write fiction, though she swears she will never write such a long book again. “It was more than 700 pages at one point, and I think when a book gets that long, it’s because you’re not in control of it. Although publishers seem to like long books.”
I suggest this might be because it allows them to feel they’re getting their money’s worth; she laughs.
She says, half jokingly, that she would like to write a “cool” novel one day – “I feel like a bit of a young fogey at the moment.” But she need not worry too much on that count. In her turban, thick-rimmed glasses and big trainers, she looks like a fairer-skinned version of Lauryn Hill. She is a fan of hip-hop, and the book is peppered with street language and hip-hop argot.
On the table behind us, two old men who’ve come in for their tea -and could have been cameo characters from White Teeth – are watching with delight as our photographer sets his equipment and Smith poses self-consciously at a window table.
“I think she’s a film star,” says one confidentially to his mate. “I’ve seen her in that thing off the telly.”
“Excuse me,” says the other, “but is she off the telly?”
“Not yet,” I say, “but she will be.”