The Gift of an English Country Idyll.

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Anita Mathias 

Omnibus Review

Commonweal Magazine.

The polished, elegant surfaces of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning volume of nine short stories, An Interpreter of Maladies (Houghton Mifflin, $12, 198 pp.) belie the howling emptiness at their depths. In her carefully observed, minimalist tales, Indian immigrants discover the nightmarish price of the American dream of lots of stuff. Strangers in a strange land, imperfectly understanding, imperfectly understood, missing their community-oriented society, they wrestle with unfamiliar New World problems–loneliness, depression, and isolation which destabilize the marriages that, in at least five stories, agonizingly disintegrate. In a savage story, “A Temporary Matter,” a suffering couple, Shoba and Shukumar, tell each other erstwhile secrets, and we watch them steadily, viciously destroy each other as they face the death of their love and marriage. “Mr. Pirzada” and “Mrs. Sen” present Indian faculty couples, alienated and adrift in a foreign world. More restfully, the final story, “The Third and Final Continent,” details the not uncommon odyssey of the restless Indian (like Lahiri’s and my own and, it’s rumored, Rushdie’s) from India through England to America; and the advent of love within the confines of an arranged marriage.

Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time Ann Hood Picador, USA, $23, 256 pp. 

Here’s an old review I wrote of “White Teeth,” Smith’s first book, for Commonweal Magazine in 2000

White Teeth Zadie Smith Random House, $24.95, 448 pp. A VIEW FROM THE MARGINS.

by Anita Mathias
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

puts 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–a self-effacing Englishman “whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios: Pebble: Beach. Raindrop: Ocean. Needle: Haystack”–and Samad Iqbal–a Bangladeshi torn between Allah, alcohol, and women. Archie marries Clara, an attractive Jamaican (and as a consequence is no longer invited to company banquets). Samad’s marriage is arranged to Alsana, who can kick and punch her husband with a ferocity that matches his own; her in-laws speculate that her family has “some funny mental history.”

The children of these two couples, Irie Jones, and the twins, Millat and Magid Iqbal, are strangers in a strange land. Irie Jones (whose name means, in patois, “everything OK, cool, peaceful”), battles with “the bird’s nest of her hair,” and her weight: her body has “brown bulges for children, bags of fruit, buckets of water, ledges genetically designed with another country in mind.”

Magid Iqbal, a freak genius, “given a glorious name like Magid Mahfooz Murshed Iqbal,” wants instead to be called Mark Smith, and attend the Harvest Festival at school “like some wood sprite,” instead of accompanying his father to Mecca. “It’s not fair. I can’t go on haj. I’ve got to go to school. I don’t have time to go to Mecca. It’s not fair.” Magid is returned to Bangladesh “to be brought up proper” by his grandparents, where he eerily turns, in a twist of poetic justice, into Macaulay’s “brown-skinned Englishmen, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” He returns seeing God “in the millionth position of pi, in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. And what more is God than that?”

Meanwhile Magid’s twin, handsome Millat Iqbal, is trouble, an exemplar of the predicted decline and fall of Western civilization. After continual scrapes with white women and authority, Millat finds his clan in KEVIN, Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, militant immigrants with “an acronym problem,” hate and anger and revenge seething beneath the shibboleths of orthodoxy.

This edgy, hip, funny novel does for today’s London what Salman Rushdie did for Bombay in Midnight’s Children, or Dickens and Thackeray did for their more homogeneous city. We meet, skewered on Zadie Smith’s Bosch-like canvas, Indian lesbian feminists, topless hippies in a commune, and teenagers wriggling in anomie and angst. Much of the plot hinges on the cultural and generational conflicts that spiral when their school’s at-risk program subjects Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones to being mentored by the third family at the nucleus of the book, the liberal Jewish Chalfens. When Marcus Chalfen, an eminent scientist, seeks to patent his genetically engineered FutureMouse, the many groups on the loony fringe of this panoramic novel–black Jehovah’s Witnesses, Islamic fundamentalists, radical animal rights activists–converge in outrage.

Smith limns the sadness of the immigrant experience in which, for the first generation, dreams steadily shrivel. Samad Iqbal, who becomes a waiter after the war, wants desperately to wear a placard saying, “I am not a waiter. I have been a student, a scientist, a soldier.” And in the background, always, is the mist of racism, overt or covert: “the oldest sentence in the world, ‘if you ask me, they should all go back to their own….'”

Smith attributes the range of her characters to “Books, books, books.” She is certainly familiar with the multicultural canon, the best thing to emerge from the rapacity and crimes of slavery and colonialism. Her characters cut their teeth on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the books of Alice Walker. They burn Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Samad owes something to Michael Ondaatje’s (The English Patient) Indian soldiers fighting in Europe during World War II. We encounter twins forcibly cleft by the corrupt older generation as in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. The sprawling novel covers Smith’s life, commencing in 1975, the year of her birth, a device borrowed from Rushdie who set Midnight’s Children in 1947, the year of his birth.

White Teeth is technically inventive, a refreshing original. Its exuberant high jinks can remind one of Rushdie’s pyrotechnics. Smith captures the dialogue of London’s contemporary tribes. “The F-word acts like padding to him; he can’t help it; it’s just a filler like beans or peas,” she explains. Her relentless sly wit, however, can be wearing and remind you that Smith is only twenty-five. Many of her characters are flat, one-dimensional, almost caricatures, their inner lives reduced to blurbs. Samad Iqbal: “Can’t say fairer than that. To the pure all things are pure.” Millat Iqbal: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” I think of Hieronymus Bosch again. The novel ends with a bang, the major characters unsatisfyingly and irritatingly freeze-framed in medias res.

In the end, Smith is no Rushdie, or Toni Morrison. Compared to their iridescent prose and inventive, anguished meditations on history, love, evil, and God, White Teeth is slight. Smith, however, is something of a multicultural Garrison Keillor, and her snappy novel is delightful, hilarious, and interesting, a good companion for what remains of these hammock
and deck chair days.

Anita Mathias’s essay, “I Was a Teenage Atheist,” appeared in the October 8, 1999 Commonweal

Sacred Waters A Pilgrimage up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture Stephen Alter Harcourt, $25, 368 pp.

A Review by Anita Mathias

Sacred Waters is a lovely, tranquil account of a spiritual journey undertaken by a third-generation missionary kid, born and raised in the Garwhal foothills of the Himalayas, where his parents and grandparents ran Woodstock, the American missionary boarding school. An atheist and a seeker now, Stephen Alter embarks on foot, over ten months, on the traditional Hindu pilgrimage, the Char Dham Yatra, to the four main sources of the Ganges, Yamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath in the high Himalayas, a path, according to popular Hindu belief, to moksha or salvation.

Alter’s fellow pilgrims are as diverse as those in The Canterbury Tales. Some are dressed in robes of saffron and ocher, others in jeans or loincloths. There are toddlers, feeble octogenarians walking while reading a prayer book, and even a pilgrim with a brass trumpet who is eager to serenade the company. Alter’s fluency in Hindi allows him to converse with the unusual people he meets: migrant Muslim dairymen, goatherds, grass cutters (gujjars), Nepalese watchmen guarding potato fields, villagers spinning wool as they walk along, an ascetic Dutch holy man (sadhu), a Belgian artist who shoots arrows into the landscape to photograph them later, rabid Hindu fundamentalists, the wildly popular film star Amitabh Bachan carried on the shoulders of Nepalese porters, women planting rice in paddies to the rhythm of a drum. He camps, “the roar of the Ganga as loud as a hurricane,” to listen to a sadhu blow away the darkness, chanting “om” on his conch shell, “clear, musical, like a trombone or a French horn.”

This dense, multilayered narrative especially fascinated me because I, too, went to boarding school in the Himalayas. Alter interweaves loving accounts of the unique, endangered flora and fauna with tales of swashbuckling figures from colonial history like Frederick Wilson (the inspiration for Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), who built the first precarious bridges over Himalayan rivers, and the hunter and naturalist, Jim Corbett, still famous in my girlhood for his books on hunting man-eating leopards and tigers. Garhwal is called Dev Bhoomi, land of the gods, for “every snow peak and glacier, every confluence and village temple is invested with mythology.” Alter enriches the landscape for his readers by narrating the legends associated with each spot he visits, from the Vedas, the Puranas, and the great epics, The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. At the same time he meets contemporary activists fighting the indiscriminate logging, motor roads, and dams that threaten the livelihood of the indigenous people, and, sadly, the mountains themselves.

Embarking on his journey as a traditional pilgrim on foot, renouncing tobacco, alcohol, sex, and meat, Alter leaves both maps and camera behind, believing the slow imprinting of experience on memory will be more effective than photographs. Detailed maps, though, would have helped readers track his progress, and photographs would certainly have enhanced his descriptions of historic temples and gorgeous vistas. Nevertheless, Sacred Waters is full of the serendipity and the peace of the wilderness. “I saw an egret flying low above the river, its white wings in sharp contrast to the gathering darkness. A peacock blundered out of a nearby tree, then glided into the valley, its long tail streaming behind it like an iridescent comet.” He wakes to find a multitude of moths cover his tent, “like delicate hand-block images pressed against the light”; he blunders into a black bear, shy barking deer, troops of rhesus and langur monkeys, and even a leopard.

The variety of Hindu worship is very much on display: a drive-by shrine to Hanuman, worshiped from the windows of a bus; a temple (nag mandir), where a cobra was worshiped; and darshan, or homage, paid at the high-altitude temples to the reclusive god Shiva. Alter is sarcastic about the lines of pilgrims five to six hours long. After walking 600 kilometers, they are efficiently herded through the sanctuary in mere seconds by venal, pushy pandits. Still, he provides sensitive and poetic descriptions of evening worship, the temple bells and the moaning of a conch, an oil lamp waved in front of the deities, while sadhus sing Sanskrit hymns, their voices harmonized into a moving tenor chorus. They then clap their hands in unison, and prostrate themselves in front of the idol, kissing the cold stone floor. A sadhu dances in rhythm with his prayers, his right hand holding an oil lamp, his left, a pair of tiny brass cymbals.

Alter, somewhat irritatingly, decries the motor roads, which provide the only way for those who lack his stamina, adventurousness, and leisure to enjoy the remote, beautiful, high mountains. He alerts us, however, to an alarmingly threatened Himalayas: landslides, precipitated by erosion and dynamiting for the motor roads, burying entire villages; and the destruction on a monumental scale of towns and hillsides to build the massive Tehri dam. Leopards are slaughtered for their skins; endangered musk deer for the six-ounce musk gland, used for perfume and medicine. Botanical poachers plunder rare herbs and flowers nearing extinction. Police are rarely seen and susceptible to bribes.

In a coda, our pilgrim visits the magical Valley of Flowers accidentally “discovered” by British mountaineers in 1931, though described in The Ramayana and The Mahabharata. In this natural wonder, like an alpine rock garden, “waterfalls spilled down cliffs, tiny springs seeped out of the ground, water so clear that it was invisible except for the wavering reflection of a profusion of flowers as in an ornate tapestry”–blue irises, primulas, dark purple lupine, fritillaria, delphinium, and columbine. Alter’s spiritual experience here is akin to Wordsworth’s pantheistic vision in his “Lines” composed near Tintern Abbey: “And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts… / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / …and the living air / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man….” This fascinating book concludes on an updraft
of tranquility. “The surrounding aura of sanctity made me bow my head. I was overcome with a sense of wonder and discovery. I felt completely at peace.” One believes him.