SOURCE: Mathias, Anita. “View from the Margins.” Commonweal 127, no. 14 (11 August 2000): 27–28.

In the following review, Mathias offers a positive assessment of White Teeth.

So-called multicultural literature in many ways extends the enterprise of the early feminist writers: “the custodians of the world's best-kept secret: / Merely the private lives of one-half of humanity,” as Carolyn Kizer put it. In this first novel, Zadie Smith, the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant to Britain, continues the enterprise of giving us the view from the margins, as she sweeps Jamaican and Bangladeshi immigrants into mainstream literature in English. For a rambunctious and quirky take on our modern cities in their color and diversity, the melting pot simmering and boiling, we could do worse than turn to the dark eyes, pressed against the window, eyeing the party within with wistfulness and scorn.

White Teeth is the saga of World War II buddies, Archibald Jones...