White Teeth

Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000.

This is a very strange novel for a woman to have written. The main character is Archie, a middle aged white man going through a divorce. His wife Ophelia has just gone through a mental break down and decieded to walk out of a door-mat's existence for the past 30 years. In a fit of depression, Archie deciedes to kill himself but is saved. He decieds to explore life without regrets now and meets Clara, a beautiful black woman who was a Jehova's witness, now in a joint-smoking, group-sex-having commune. She is 19, but has a broken relationship with Ryan, who introduced her to a new life-style but then, under her mother Hertonse's influence, turned more of a Jehova's witness than her. The title of the novel derives from Clara's buck tooth, which she looses in a bike accident with Ryan. Now she has no teeth at all in the front row.
Salman Rushdie had assured us that this book "has bite."