townesvanfaulkner

Writing Style-7.2
Originality-8.1
Plot-7.0
Literary Merit(whatever that means)-7.2
Overall-7.4

This book is fabulous. Really, really top notch. As evidenced by its inclusion in the recently published top 100 novels from Time magazine.

This is the author’s debut novel, published at the ripe old age of 23 and was very well received by critics.

It’s about multiculturalism in a very ethnically mixed neighborhood in London. It’s centered around two families. One family consists of Archie Jones, a depressed, overweight, old white guy who marries Clara, a much younger Jamaican girl running away from her mom who is a crazy Jehovah ’s Witness. They have a daughter named Irie. The other family is Muslim and of Bengali descent. This family consists of the father Samad Iqbal and his wife Alsana. Samad and Alsana have twin sons, Millat and Magid, who are friends with Irie.

Okay, there’s your cast of characters. Samad and Archie become reluctant and unlikely best friends after serving in WWII together. Then they are neighbors in London.

My favorite part of the novel is about Samad’s twin sons. Samad wants them to be good Muslims and respect their Bengali heritage. He wants to send them to school in India where he came from, but he only has money to send one. He picks his favorite, the more promising Magid. Millat has to stay home in London. The interesting thing that happens is that this backfires completely on him. Magid ends up being a pro-British, agnostic engineer and Millat, in London, turns into a Muslim extremist.

It’s a great story and I think the point is to highlight what life is like for immigrants and people with different cultural backgrounds in England, and similarly I’m sure in America. The characters struggle with their identities. There is the desire to fit in vs. the desire to be true to your heritage. This is well developed in Millat and Magid’s story. They can’t simply be themselves, one has to overcompensate fitting in and the other has to overcompensate by rebelling against his surroundings. Also, there is the violent mixing of very different ideas in one place. The strange bond between Samad and Archie is very touching.

And then, there’s the very interesting story of Clara’s mom, the Jehovah’s Witness, who is always working to convert people and predict and announce to whoever will listen when the world is coming to an end. She drives Clara away but catches another unlikely convert in the neighborhood.

As you can see, there is a lot of plot here to be juggled and many characters with very different viewpoints to be fleshed out. And Zadie Smith does this brilliantly, especially for a debut novel by a 23 year old. The story never loses focus. You come to care about all of the characters. And they all have a unique voice, it’s not like many amateurish, debut novels where every character sounds the same and just isn’t convincing in their uniqueness.

This book gets a resounding recommendation. It’s easy, compelling reading with a lot of heart and soul.

This is how cool the author looks: