Of Roots and Family Trees

You don't know her yet, but British novelist Zadie Smith, 24, is such a phenomenon on that side of the Atlantic that she has even reviewed herself. At 21, she scored a reported $400,000, two-book deal on the strength of 100 pages that she churned out while cramming for finals at Cambridge University. That initial effort became White Teeth (Random House; 448 pages; $24.95), a book that has finally made it to the U.S. side of the ocean and that Smith describes in the British arts magazine Butterfly as "the literary equivalent of a hyperactive, ginger-haired, tap-dancing 10-year-old."

But there is no childish frivolity on display as she navigates her newly acquired apartment in a leafy suburb of northwest London. (Her home is a five-minute drive from Willesden Green, where her novel is set and where her mother and two younger brothers reside.) Smith strides past the living room, which is cluttered with half-opened boxes and iconography (a portrait of Billie Holiday, another of Marilyn Monroe and magazines featuring Madonna on the cover--"It's my life's ambition to meet her," she explains). Entering a tiny study, she plops herself down and begins rolling a cigarette.

"When I was writing, I was very determined to prove something," she says, "and that's a shame because that's a bad instinct." What did she have to prove? Perhaps that a young, half-Jamaican, half-white female could write a novel that transcends her personal demographics. "A lot of black writing is this love-in, and I definitely don't write love-ins," she says, adding, "What did people think I was going to write? Some kind of searing slave drama or single-girl-in-London tale?"

Instead, she wrote about the unlikely friendship of Archie Jones, a middle-aged white man who folds paper for a living, and Samad Iqbal, a middle-aged Bengali waiter who folds napkins. Theirs is a relationship born of World War II, forged on a lie and nourished on the greasy eggs served at O'Connell's Pool House, which, by the way, is neither Irish nor a pool hall. In fact, nothing in their lives has turned out as it seemed it would.

The same can be said of Smith. She planned to be a tap dancer ("I got too fat") or a jazz singer ("I wasn't as good as Aretha"), despite a lifelong interest in writing. She grew up in an irreligious, working-class household in London. Her father, a onetime photographer, and her mother, a model turned child psychoanalyst, divorced when she was 12. Smith took to writing short stories and poetry during an adolescence she describes as "pathologically angst ridden." She hasn't outgrown the angst: her manner is painfully serious, even defensive, despite the success of White Teeth, which she says "just kind of fell out of the sky."

The novel begins with Archie's suicide attempt, which ends not in death but in holy matrimony to the prettiest young thing in his vicinity. She is Clara Bowden, 19, Jamaican and missing the entire upper deck of her teeth. That is only the literal manifestation of her rootlessness, for she has lost her faith (Jehovah's Witnesses) and loses her mother, who kicks her out upon learning of her miscegenation. Archie and Clara are supposed to save each other. Instead, they spend their lives accommodating an impulsive moment.

Samad's union with Alsana Begum, then 20, couldn't have begun more differently--it was arranged--but it too is a negotiation in disappointment. Which is in part why the men turn to O'Connell's, for "it feels good--no it feels great--to know at least one particular place, one particular period, from firsthand experience, eye-witness reports; to be the authority, to have time on your side, for once, for once." Smith later turns her attention to the next generation, to Archie's daughter Irie, an unwieldy girl who feels herself "a stranger in a stranger land" and to Samad's twin sons Magid and Millat, who become guinea pigs in a bizarre cultural experiment aimed at redeeming Samad's pride. His designs eventually intersect with those of a bona fide genetic engineer, with outrageous results.

Smith wanted to write what she terms "a big book," and she has. She exposes the hilarity of the rules we live by--whether they are determined by religion or geography or biology. Immigrants, in particular, face a paradox, for they have broken with the codes of their homeland in search of a better alternative, but the new rules leave them longing for the old rules. White Teeth doesn't harangue or choose sides; it sketches characters that hover on the human edge of caricature. The novel is so sprawling, so audacious, that at times it feels as if Smith has lost control. "It could have done with a huge amount of editing," she concedes.

Her next effort is The Autograph Man, a leaner novel about a half-Chinese, half-Jewish autograph hunter that is peopled with porn freaks, movie stars and sexual deviants. She is determined to write a daring book, perhaps more along the lines of American Psycho, which she considers the finest book about the '80s. "I don't want to be on my best behavior anymore," she warns. With this pungent debut, she has certainly earned the right to misbehave.