SOURCE: Smith, Zadie, and Stephanie Merritt. “Zadie Smith.” London Observer (16 January 2000): 12.

In the following interview, Smith and Merritt discuss race, the success of White Teeth, and Smith's future works.

The hype began in the autumn of 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 Pounds 250,000.

Nearly two-and-a-half years on, White Teeth is finished, at a weighty 462 pages, and about to be published. It is a broad, teeming, comic novel of multiracial Britain viewed through the lives of two families, 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 café in Willesden, north-west London, not unlike the one in which her two main characters, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal, spend...