Zadie Smith

Taking Fame With a Grain of Salt

With the publication of her novel White Teeth, Britain's Zadie Smith became an overnight sensation and poster girl for the interracial themes explored in her book.

Zadie Smith has been built up and bashed back down again. As one of Britain's best-selling young authors, she's so well known that she literally uprooted and moved to the United States recently just to get some peace.

No doubt about it, the talented young author has landed on her feet. Still in her early twenties, Smith has enjoyed the kind of literary success that most writers only dream of when they are starting out.

Her debut novel, White Teeth, which she wrote at the tender age of 21, is an epic tale of multicultural post-colonial Britain. The book traces the assimilation of two families into the North London community over 25 years.

The story circles around two families -- one Anglo-Jamaican and the other Bangladeshi-Muslim. The novel's characters also take excursions to Bangladesh and Bulgaria, exposing readers to religious fanaticism, the women's movement and even genetic engineering. It is, in Smith's own words: "a book about the last 50 years in Britain."

Art imitating life

Many were quick to point out that White Teeth is, among other things, the tale of Smith’s own deprived childhood in London.

Born in 1975 in Willesden Green, a none-too-glamourous suburb of London, Smith was educated at the local primary school in the even less salubrious district of Kilburn. She continued her state education at a secondary school in Cricklewood before studying at Cambridge. She graduated in 1998, gaining a first class honors degree in English.

While she attended Cambridge, she moonlighted as a novelist, writing what would become her first bestseller. The development was ironic given that Smith never intended to become a writer. Her first dream was to become a tap dancer and she later toyed with the idea of being a jazz singer.

But, she admits nowadays, "slowly, but surely, the pen became mightier than the double pick-up timestep."

Critical acclaim

After its publication in 2000, critics heaped praise on White Teeth. Salman Rushdie, who helped Smith land a book contract in the first place, called it "an astonishingly assured debut." The judges of the Whitbread literary prize, which Smith went on to win, declared it "perhaps the best novel we have read about contemporary London." Smith also bagged the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the British Book Awards Newcomer of the year and the Frankfurt eBook Award.

But Smith herself was less than enthusiastic about the bestseller. Despite moving 42,000 copies in hardback and almost three-quarters of a million in paperback (it was the second best-selling fiction paperback of 2001), she called it a "baggy monster," telling Deutsche Welle she thought it was "fairly overdone."

But sometimes you have to cut yourself some slack, and Smith did exactly that. "I was 21, and when you’re 21 you do things badly in general. There probably is too much in it and I certainly wouldn’t write a book like that again,” she said.

Smith also refuses to believe her work is simply a mirror of her own life experience. “There has been a lot of discussion about the themes of the book; I never conceived it that way. It isn't very autobiographical," she said. "The most autobiographical thing about it are the ideas, but I wouldn’t say it was particularly representative of my family."

A fairytale ending

Without spoiling the surprise, one can write that White Teeth has a happy ending. It's one which Smith herself admits you can see coming from a mile off – it's even Dickensian in style. Yet she shrugs off suggestions that she falls into fairytale land, saying simply: "Sometimes you give your characters the breaks you don’t get in life, so I gave them the breaks."

That Smith can utter such a sentence is rather rich when one considers her own spectacular rise to fame. Before bursting onto the literary scene with White Teeth, she had only published a few short stories in small-time literary anthologies published at Oxford and Cambridge.