The Great American Read--The Book of Books

by PBS

  Author Zadie Smith. White Teeth was her debut novel, and an immediate bestseller.

  Smith photographed in 2014, speaking at a panel during the New Yorker Festival. Smith currently teaches writing at New York University.

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  WHITE TEETH

  Zadie Smith · 2000

  London still teems with possibility, much as it did when William Shakespeare strode the boards at the Globe, Charles Dickens walked its streets, Arthur Conan Doyle uncovered its mysteries, and Virginia Woolf described its postwar denizens. For English writers, London sometimes seems like Mount Everest, the peak they must scale to reach great heights. To tell the story of her London, Zadie Smith created the Joneses and the Iqbals, two very different families who come to represent the city’s manifold multicultural threads.

  Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal met in the army during World War II. Decades later, they live near one another in northwest London, Jones with his much younger Jamaican wife, Clara, and their smart daughter, Irie, and Samad with his arranged wife, Alsana, and their twin boys, Magid and Millat. The friendship between the run-of-the-mill Englishman and the immigrant from Bangladesh acts as the fulcrum around which White Teeth maneuvers.

  White Teeth (2000) launched Smith’s career as a comic novelist as well as her role as a spokesperson for multiethnic, multiracial Britain. Alsana sews clothes for a popular S&M shop, while Samad worries that his frequent masturbation undermines his religious values. Their son Millat joins an Islamist fundamentalist group that goes by the acronym KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation). It’s supposed to be funny, and it is. But behind the jokes burst razor-sharp ideas. The characters of Archie and Samad allow Smith to explore the intersections of racial and economic prejudice. Archie works for a paper-folding company, pretty satisfied with his lot; Samad works as a waiter, and rages against how far his family has fallen from its once-lofty heights. Smith is also concerned with the impact of immigration on subsequent generations: Samad sends one son to Bangladesh to become a devout Muslim, yet he returns having lost his faith. His other son goes from being a womanizer to a radical. And as a biracial woman, Irie straddles two worlds—the England of her dad and the Jamaica of her mom—though she feels that she fits into neither. As Irie, Magid, and Millat all come into the orbit of geneticist Marcus Chalfen, they find themselves asking how much control they really have over their lives.

  Smith’s novel is all the more remarkable considering that she began writing it while earning an undergraduate degree at Cambridge. The book became an immediate bestseller and won such honors as the Guardian First Book Award, Whitbread Award for First Novel, and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. The author was born in London in 1975 to a Jamaican mother and a white British father. She changed her name from Sadie to Zadie as a teen, influenced by Zora Neale Hurston, and was the first person in her family to go to college. Now she teaches creative writing at New York University. Recently Smith has become known as an essayist as well as a novelist, publishing on topics as varied as British comedians, Brooklyn rappers, and novelists from all over, in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and elsewhere; some of these essays are collected in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (2009) and Feel Free (2018).

  Critic James Wood invented the term hysterical realism to describe Smith’s debut and similar novels that combine social realism, stylized prose full of pyrotechnics and digressions, and elaborate, twisty plots. Addressing his critique, Smith noted that “writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.” In the years since the astonishing White Teeth kicked off, she’s retold Howards End (1910), by E. M. Forster, as On Beauty (2005); juxtaposed different types of prose to describe urban life in NW (2012); and addressed friendship in an allegedly postracial world in Swing Time (2016). It’s our great fortune that there is so much in her, and so much left to come.

  A three-volume first edition set of Wuthering Heights, originally published in 1847.

  A portrait of Emily Brontë, painted by Patrick Branwell Brontë, circa 1833.

  A promotional poster for a screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in a 1939 William Wyler drama.

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  WUTHERING HEIGHTS

  Emily Brontë · 1847

  We have Charlotte Brontë to thank for our conception of Emily Brontë. After Charlotte’s success with Jane Eyre (1847), she wrote a preface to an edition of her sister’s novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). In it, Charlotte explains that the novel “was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials… wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of [the artist’s] meditations.” There begins our image of the author, too shy to speak to anyone but her family, yet in possession of an incredible imagination, capable of creating a work of astonishing feeling and yawning depravity.

  Born to an Irish clergyman in 1818 in Yorkshire, Emily grew up writing poems, plays, and stories about countries in the imaginary Glass Town Federation with her brother Branwell and sisters Charlotte and Anne, both of whom became celebrated novelists as well. As teens, they collected their literary efforts in a series of self-published magazines. Emily briefly attended boarding school, but she and Charlotte were removed due to the school’s harsh and horrid conditions (two other Brontë sisters grew ill at the school and died). As an adult, she taught for a short time and studied with Charlotte in Brussels, but mostly she stayed on the moors where she grew up and where she set Wuthering Heights. She died of tuberculosis in 1848, a year after the book was published, at age 30.

  As the novel begins, Mr. Lockwood rents Thrushcross Grange in the lonely Yorkshire landscape. Puzzled and bored by his surroundings, Lockwood asks his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him about the inscrutable Heathcliff, his landlord and neighbor in nearby Wuthering Heights. She describes the entangled destinies of the Lintons and the Earnshaws, explaining how Heathcliff arrived, how he and Catherine Earnshaw fell in love, and how they became involved with Edgar and Isabella Linton, who lived at Thrushcross Grange, to the detriment of all.

  Right away Wuthering Heights makes clear the problem of interpretation. Lockwood recounts stories that he hears from Nelly, who is often recollecting events that happened decades before, or paraphrasing conversations that she couldn’t have been privy to. Nelly interprets as she goes, and Lockwood consistently and comically misreads Heathcliff and Cathy, Catherine’s daughter and Heathcliff’s daughter-in-law. These frames within frames leave the reader on shaky ground: everyone in this novel is an unreliable narrator, and despite the small number of characters and confined setting, the story becomes, as Charlotte said, “knotty as a root of heath.”

  The welter of confusion that Wuthering Heights sows is reflected in its reception. Its first reviewers were baffled, marveling at its power but struck mute when trying to explain what the book is ultimately about; one critic recommended it be burned, while another described it as “one of the greatest novels in the language.” Often thought of as a sweeping romance, in reality it presents a truly discomforting vision of love, showing it to be an obsessive, violent passion that drives individuals to wholly subsume themselves in one another. Over the course of the novel, the love plot gives way to a revenge plot that threatens to drag everyone in the story toward inexorable doom. Infamously, William Wyler’s 1939 film version, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, simply omits that problematic part of the book.

  Charlotte fostered the image of her sister as an untrained savant in part because Wuthering Heights is utterly unlike anything that came before. In his 1948 book The Great Tradition, the eminent critic F. R. Leavis admitted that he could say nothing about Wuthering Heights because it seems to be completely outside of any literary tradition. Even today it stands alone in literature, a solitary crag rearing up from the windswept moors.

  How to Read a Literary Text

  UNLESS THE SPINE SAYS Agatha Christie, in most instances reading a novel isn’t about unlocking or unc
overing a mystery planted by an author, nor is there a single message waiting to be deciphered. Instead, literature yields many diverse interpretations, depending on the attitudes, backgrounds, and understanding of its readers. Asking questions helps deepen the reading experience, offering the chance to engage with a literary text on multiple levels, as well as heightening your intellectual and imaginative involvement with what’s on the page.

  What is the point of view? Who tells the story? Is the narrator reliable or unreliable?

  The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) employs the first-person point of view; the person telling the story, also known as the narrator, uses “I” and is directly involved in the events depicted. In the books comprising A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–present), by contrast, George R. R. Martin shifts point of view so that readers often see the same event from multiple perspectives.

  What is the setting of the novel? What kind of world is being portrayed?

  Doña Bárbara (1929) takes place in rural Venezuela, a world so recognizable to its initial readers that the author had to go into exile to protect himself from retaliation from the government. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) transpires in a lightly fictionalized version of Mark Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, while the action portrayed in the Wheel of Time books (1990–2013) happens in an entirely imagined setting.

  What’s the order of events? How is the work structured? Why is the story told in the order that it is?

  War and Peace (1869) begins as members of Saint Petersburg’s high society start to hear rumblings about Napoleon’s march through Europe, and it ends shortly after the Russian rout of the French invasion. In between, Leo Tolstoy detours into philosophical ruminations inspired by the events being narrated. Invisible Man (1952), A Separate Peace (1959), and Beloved (1987) rely on flashbacks to drive their plots, suggesting the importance of history and the personal past to the present.

  When does the action take place? Over what time period? In what era? Now, the past, the very very past? The future?

  The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) takes place thousands of years ago, when Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals walked the earth. The nine novels that form the Tales of the City series (1978–2014) move roughly contemporarily, from the 1970s, when the first book was published, into the 2010s, when the final book came out. Isaac Asimov imagined a very distant future in the Foundation series (1951–1993): its Galactic Empire resets the calendar to 1 GE in 12,500 CE.

  What kind of language is used? Descriptive? Straightforward? Plainspoken? Lofty?

  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) jumbles English and Spanish, high and low diction, and references to erudite literature and comic books—sometimes in the same paragraph or even sentence. Nicholas Sparks attributes the success of The Notebook (1996) in part to its use of simple and chaste language, while George Orwell invented several words—among them minipax, sexcrime, and unperson—to describe life in the totalitarian society of Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

  What’s the pace of the novel? Fast? Slow? Does it take place over a day, a month, a decade?

  The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) begins when narrator Christopher finds the body of his neighbor’s dog, murdered with a pitchfork. As Christopher learns the truth about what happened to Wellington the poodle, he also starts to learn the truth about what happened to his mother, whom he believes to be dead. The novel offers a neat symmetry between Christopher’s external and emotional discoveries over roughly the course of a school year.

  What form does the work take?

  As an epistolary novel, The Color Purple (1982) consists of letters written by an uneducated woman named Celie to her sister Nettie and to God. Gilead (2004) also takes the form of a letter, in this case a discursive, diary-like account written by an elderly father to his young son. Wuthering Heights (1847) folds in on itself, as a series of stories, retellings, and interpretations by narrators with varying degrees of unreliability.

  What are the key ideas or themes?

  The Hunger Games (2008) directly censures a voyeuristic culture in which reality shows traffic in the humiliation and pain of their participants. The Alchemist (1988) urges readers to follow their dreams. The Little Prince (1943) proffers life lessons on every page. Christian novels like This Present Darkness (1986), Swan Song (1987), and Mind Invaders (1989) promote religious messages, such as the power of prayer or a belief in an omnipotent divinity.

  What are the recurring images or symbols?

  Eyes—and the related action of watching—appear throughout The Great Gatsby (1925). Narrator Nick Carraway observes the behavior of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, among others. Gatsby gazes at the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, itself a symbol of his hopes and regrets. On a fateful journey to New York City, the characters pass a billboard featuring the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg—a creepy advertisement that literally looms. The white whale known as Moby Dick in the 1851 novel may be the most famous, and mutable, of all literary symbols, sometimes said to stand in for death, nature, and even God.

  Put yourself in the shoes of the main character. What would you do differently? How would you feel if you were put into the same situation?

  The Martian (2011) opens as astronaut Mark Watney realizes he’s alone on Mars, his fellow NASA crewmembers having returned to Earth, as horrifying a fate as one could imagine. The book then presents a sequence of problems that Watney must solve, leading readers to ask themselves what solutions they would or wouldn’t select. In Great Expectations (1861), Pip is repeatedly confronted with difficult choices, and readers continue to debate whether he makes the correct decisions in those challenging situations.

  What drives the main character? What does he or she want? What obstacles stand in the way?

  A strong sense of right and wrong motivates such heroes as Jack Ryan and Alex Cross, in novels by Tom Clancy and James Patterson, respectively, as they seek to preserve justice and order. In The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), Frodo Baggins wants to destroy the One Ring, which simultaneously attracts and wounds everyone in its presence, but his quest to throw it into the fires of Mount Doom is thwarted by an array of enemies, including Gollum and followers of Sauron.

  How well do the characters understand the situation they’re in? What do readers know that characters don’t?

  The characters in the Left Behind series (1995–2007) have literally been left behind, as the truly faithful went to heaven during the Rapture, a fate that those remaining strive to comprehend. Over the 16 novels, their faith is severely tested, and they gradually discover that the Antichrist walks among them. A recent trend in publishing has been the popularity of YA fiction with adult readers, who, from their more mature vantage points, may take a more even-keeled approach to the dramatic heartache and headaches of teen life.

  What is the primary conflict of the story?

  Sometimes the primary conflict might be external, such as the epic battle between Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort, or the escalating tension and ensuing violence between gangs in The Outsiders (1967). Other times the conflict is internal, such as whether Buck will choose to heed “the call of the wild” in Jack London’s novel by the same name, or whether Raskolnikov should turn himself in for his terrible deeds in Crime and Punishment (1866).

  What other books did this book remind you of?

  In their warnings about the dangers of unethical scientific inquiry, Watchers (1987) and Jurassic Park (1990) put contemporary spins on Frankenstein (1818). The Fifty Shades of Grey novels (2011–present) got their start as fan fiction written by E. L. James, after she fell under the spell of the Twilight saga (2005–2008) by Stephenie Meyer. Pretty much any novel featuring an antsy, irreverent teen takes us straight back to The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

  If you could ask the author one question, what would it be?

  Some novels end conclusively: we know, for instance, that Don Quixote loses his illusions about the permeability between fiction and reality, ret
urning sadly to sanity, and that Alice dreamed her adventures in Wonderland. Other books, however, leave us hungry for more information. What kind of adult does Tony, from Bless Me, Ultima (1972), become? What happens to Nick and Amy after Gone Girl (2012) ends? Do they make it, or continue to mess with one another?

  How do the characters change? What do they learn?

  Siddhartha (1922) carefully tracks the changes of Siddhartha, as he seeks spiritual solace in various places and through various intermediaries. Ultimately, he finds that true peace comes from developing a connection to the natural world. After his extensive travels, however, Gulliver returns home despairing and despondent. In The Joy Luck Club (1989), a daughter uncovers the hidden life of her mother, which creates a new sense of cultural ties and deepens familial bonds.

  What’s the title of the work, and why does it matter? How does it set up your expectations before you begin reading? How does your understanding of the title change after you’ve finished?

  In the thriller Rebecca (1938), the second Mrs. de Winter eventually ferrets out what happened to the first, the Rebecca of the title. Her obsession to find out the truth drives the book’s plot. However, the titular character never appears in the novel itself—she’s dead before the main action begins—and, although we’re told that the narrator has a “lovely and unusual” first name, we never learn it.

  What strikes you about the names used for characters and places in the novel? What kind of information or insight do you get from these labels?

  Probably no book so clearly telegraphs its message via the names of its characters and places as The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). In this religious allegory about spiritual awakening, Christian, the protagonist, travels up Difficulty Hill, across the Valley of Humiliation, and through the Delectable Mountains, meeting people with names like Old Honest, Contrite, and Standfast, on his way to the Celestial City.