SOURCE: Rozzo, Mark. “Who's English Now?” Los Angeles Times Book Review (7 May 2000): 10–11.

In the following review, Rozzo outlines the major themes in White Teeth, complimenting its style, symbolism, and wit.

Check out a map of London: The city seems to sprawl endlessly, its high streets spoking this way and that amid a dizzying patchwork of interlocking hamlets and maddeningly meandering lanes. Insatiable curiosity and the desire to make sense of it draws the eye back again and again, retracing routes, discovering patterns, seeing new colors.

In Zadie Smith's dazzling intergenerational first novel, White Teeth, the 24-year-old Cambridge graduate offers a similarly hypnotic and multicolored experience, transforming London's outlines into an infinitely complex mandala whose true shape is, in the end, unfixed and unknowable. Against this beguiling backdrop, with its shades of Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi and even Charles Dickens, Smith's multicultural Londoners attend to pressing questions...