SOURCE: Moseley, Merritt. “The Modern World.” World & I 15, no. 9 (September 2000): 220.

In the following review, Moseley assesses the depth and maturity of White Teeth, comparing Smith's sympathy for her characters and the role of her narrator to the similar traits of nineteenth-century English novelist George Eliot.

Samad Iqbal, one of two central characters in White Teeth, Zadie Smith's remarkable debut novel, is a troubled man. He is troubled by his children, by his place in a multicultural Britain, by his inability to be the kind of good Muslim he wants himself (and others) to be. As he thinks to himself, “To the pure, all things are pure.” But who is pure? This question may be said to be at the heart of White Teeth. The first fact that will strike most readers is the multiracial texture of the novel. There are no pure English anymore. Samad's wife, Alsana, tells...