To me, it seems like every vaguely successful author is hailed, at some point in their career, as the "voice of a generation"--for an author under thirty, this cliche may be altered to "voice of the next generation."What that means, I have no idea.
Or, I had no idea until I came across Zadie Smith's THE AUTOGRAPH MAN, which seems to encompass--without being melodramatic, dull or self-indulgent--the very essence, somehow, of the issues my generation deals with. Somehow, Smith does seem to be the "voice of a (next) generation."
I'm really not sure how to flesh that out, but I know I mean it, and in one last attempt to back it up, I'll say this: without referencing iPods and other embarrassingly "relevant" things, Smith burrows right into the weird uncertainty an entire generation can feel when their sole purpose seems to be purchasing and admiring objects, whether these objects be gadgets, lifestyles or (as in the case of celebrities) people.
RATING: 4
This is a novel of "grand proportions," I think. Certainly, WHITE TEETH is "astonishing," "dazzling," a real "tour-de-force"--one could even conceivably call this "the first great novel of the new century." All those phrases that have turned up on the dusk jackets of less deserving books, the phrases rendered meaningless by overuse (my dad and I recently looked up tour de force: "A feat requiring great virtuosity or strength, often deliberately undertaken for its difficulty: 'In an extraordinary structural tour de force the novel maintains a dual focus'"--you may note that the example cited is literary), apply to WHITE TEETH in the very best sort of way: what all those other "beguiling" novels attempt, WHITE TEETH succeeds at beautifully.