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1. S U M M A R Y R E P O R T B Y : M E L L A N Y S I A P O
WHITE TEETH
by Zadie Smith

2. SUMMARY
 On New Year's Day 1975, Archie Jones, a 47-year-old
Englishman whose disturbed Italian wife has just
walked out on him, is attempting to take his own life
by gassing himself in his car when a chance
interruption causes him to change his mind. Filled
with a fresh enthusiasm for life, Archie flips a coin
and then finds his way into the aftermath of a New
Year's Eve party.

3. SUMMARY
 There he meets the much-younger Clara Bowden, a
Jamaican woman whose mother, Hortense, is a
devout Jehovah's Witness. Clara had been interested
in the unattractive, anti-social Ryan Topps, but their
relationship falls apart after Ryan becomes a
member of the Jehovah's Witnesses and becomes
close to her mother. Archie and Clara are soon
married and have a daughter, Irie, who grows up to
be intelligent but with low self-confidence.

4. SUMMARY
 Also living in Willesden, London, is Archie's best
friend Samad Iqbal,
a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh; the two men
spend much of their time at the O'Connell's pub.
Archie and Samad met in 1945 when they were part
of a tank crew inching through Europe in the final
days of World War II, though they missed out on the
action.

5. SUMMARY
 Following the war, Samad emigrated to Britain and
married Alsana Iqbal, née Alsana Begum, or "Miss
Alsana", in a traditional arranged marriage. Samad is
a downtrodden waiter in a West End curry house,
and is obsessed by the history of his supposed but
unlikely great-grandfather, Mangal Pandey, a Hindu
soldier from Uttar Pradesh, not Bengal, who is
famous for firing the first shot of the Indian
Rebellion of 1857 (though he missed and was
executed). Samad and Alsana have twin boys, Magid
and Millat, who are the same age as Irie.

6. SUMMARY
 Samad in particular finds it difficult to maintain his
devotion to Islam in an English life; he is continually
tormented by what he sees as the effects of this
cultural conflict upon his own moral character—his
Muslim values are corrupted by his masturbation,
beer drinking, and his affair with his children's
music teacher, Poppy Burt-Jones.

7. SUMMARY
 In an attempt to preserve his traditional beliefs, he
sends 10-year-old Magid to Bangladesh in the hope
that he will grow up properly under the teachings of
Islam. From then on, the lives of the two boys follow
very different paths. To Samad's fury, Magid
becomes an Anglicised atheist and devotes his life to
science. Millat, meanwhile, pursues a rebellious path
of womanising, drinking and petty hooliganism—as
well as harbouring a love of mob movies such as The
Godfather and Goodfellas.

8. SUMMARY
 Angry at his people's marginalisation in English
society, Millat demonstrates against Salman
Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989
and eventually pledges himself to a militant
Muslim fundamentalist brotherhood known as
"Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic
Nation" (KEVIN).

9. SUMMARY
 The lives of the Joneses and Iqbals intertwine with
that of the white, middle-class Chalfens, a lapsed
Jewish-Catholic family of Oxbridge-educated
intellectuals who typify a distinctive strain of North
London liberal trendiness, and who are recruited by
Irie and Millat's school to tutor them. The father,
Marcus Chalfen, is a university lecturer
and geneticist working on a controversial
'FutureMouse' project in which he introduces
chemical carcinogens into the body of a mouse and is
thus able to observe the progression of a tumour in
living tissue.

10. SUMMARY
 By re-engineering the actual genome and watching
cancers progress at pre-determined times, Marcus
believes he is eliminating the random. The mother, Joyce
Chalfen, is a horticulturist and part-time housewife with
an often entirely misguided desire to mother and 'heal'
Millat as if he were one of her plants. To some extent, the
Chalfen family provides a safe haven as they (believe
themselves to) accept and understand the turbulent lives
of Irie, Magid, and Millat. Irie finds herself working for
Marcus as a secretary, Marcus takes an intellectual
interest in Magid and subsidizes his flight home, and
even Millat's grades slightly improve.

11. SUMMARY
 However, both Alsana and Clara become suspicious of
their children constantly spending time at the Chalfens,
and Joyce and Marcus's arrogance antagonize both Clara
and the Iqbal family. The Chalfens' actions also comes at
the expense of their own son, Joshua, whose difficulties
are ignored by his parents. Originally a well-moulded
"Chalfenist", Joshua rebels against his father and his
background by joining the radical animal rights group
"Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation" (FATE).
Meanwhile, after his return from Bangladesh, Magid
works as Marcus's research assistant on the FutureMouse
project, while Millat becomes further involved in KEVIN.

12. SUMMARY
 Irie, who has been working for Marcus, briefly
succeeds in her long-hidden attraction to Millat but
is rejected under his KEVIN-inspired beliefs. Irie
believes that Millat cannot love her, for he has
always been "the second son" both symbolically and
literally, for Millat was born two minutes after
Magid. Irie makes Magid the "second son" for a
change by sleeping with him immediately after
having sex with Millat. This causes her to become
pregnant, and she is left unsure of the father of her
child, as the brothers are identical twins.

13. SUMMARY
 The strands of the narrative grow closer as Millat and KEVIN,
Joshua and FATE, and Clara's mother Hortense and the Jehovah's
Witnesses all plan to demonstrate their opposition to Marcus's
FutureMouse—which they view as an evil interference with their
own religious and ethical beliefs—at its exhibition on New Year's
Eve 1992. At the Perret Institute, Hortense and the other Jehovah's
Witnesses sing loudly in the hallway. Samad goes out to hush them,
but when he arrives he cannot summon the heart to make them
stop. When he returns, he realizes that the founder of the Perret
Institute and the oldest scientist on Marcus Chalfen's panel is Dr.
Perret, the Nazi he captured during World War II. Enraged that
Archie did not kill him all those years ago, Samad runs over and
begins cursing Archie. Just then, Millat advances on the table of
scientists with a gun. Without thinking, Archie jumps in front of
him and takes a bullet in the thigh. As he falls, he knocks over the
mouse's glass cage, and it escapes.

14. SUMMARY
 At the novel's end, the narrator presents us with
different "end games" in the style of television.
Magid and Millat both serve community service for
Millat's crime, since witnesses identify both as the
culprit. Joshua and Irie end up together and join
Hortense in Jamaica in the year 2000 with Irie's
daughter. Mickey opens up the previously men-only
O'Connell's pub to women, and Archie and Samad
finally invite their wives along with them.

15.  END