Summer Reading: White Teeth

White Teeth by Zadie Smith was the one book on my summer reading list that I was the least interested in reading (hence the reason I saved it for last).  I really wanted to like this book because it has been lauded by so many critics but I just didn't find it to be very appealing. I get that it is a treatise about the immigrant experience and generational conflict but I thought it was very boring at times and I kept waiting for some sort of climax that would tie all of the disparate narratives together but I was left feeling more confused than ever at the end of the novel. It focuses on the lives of World War II buddies, Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, and their wives and children in post-colonial Britain.  Iqbal and his wife are originally from Bangladesh and are afraid that their twin sons are straying from their traditional values. They decide to send one of the sons to live with family in Bangladesh (they can only afford to send one). The son in Bangladesh becomes an Anglophile while the one in Britain becomes involved with a terrorist organization. Jones marries an immigrant from Jamaica (after deciding that meeting her is a sign not to kill himself) and their daughter is incredibly smart but lacks self-esteem because of her looks and, like the twins, she struggles with her identity. There are lots of tangential family members, such as a niece who has shamed the family and a grandmother who is a devout Jehovah's Witness, for comic relief. To be sure, all of the characters are quirky and their dialogue is, at times, quite hilarious, but I didn't find them to be sympathetic. I did laugh at many things in this novel but it wasn't funny enough to keep my attention. Also, the leitmotif of teeth as a symbol of success seems really forced to me, almost as if those passages were added to the novel after it was finished so Smith could use it as a title. There is something to be said when a person who usually devours books in one or two days takes about three weeks to plow through it.  This novel just wasn't for me.