SOURCE: Lanchester, John. “The Land of Accidents.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 2 (28 February 2001): 29–31.

In the following review, Lanchester examines White Teeth, focusing on the characters's searches for self-identity in culturally diverse England.

In April 1990, Norman Tebbit, the former chairman of the British Conservative Party, made a speech on the subject of immigration. He imagined Asian and Afro-Caribbean citizens of the United Kingdom watching a cricket match between their former homelands and their adopted country, and posed a question:

Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still looking back to where you came from or where you are? Well, you can't have two homes. Where you have a clash of history, a clash of religion, a clash of race, then it's all too easy for there to be an actual clash of violence.

“The cricket test,” as it came to be called, immediately...