Zadie Smith

White Teeth had several strikes against it.

1. It’s found in every airport bookstore.
2. It’s always on display tables with Bridget Jones.
3. The back cover had a big picture of the author.
4. The author is too pretty.

None of those disqualify a book for me. I enjoyed Bridget Jones, and Nick Hornby’s in every airport, and Steinbeck made sure readers knew what he looked like, and there’s plenty of room in the world for pretty people. When you put them all together, though, it sets a certain expectation.

Zadie Smith far surpassed that expectation!

Although the book could be lumped in with the recent wave of immigrant-lit, Smith’s story swells in breadth and depth beyond the usual nobody-loves-me themes. She creates on a multi-generational tale with major political and religious themes, and she juggles it masterfully with wit and compassion. She restored my hope that Britain may still produce great authors.

If there’s no “Writing the Opposite Sex” award, there should be, and it should go to her. The only woman I’ve read who manages it as well is Pearl S. Buck-but Buck’s job is easier since she doesn’t bother with humor. Unfortunately, her female characters don’t seem nearly so alive. All of them play one-trait roles and seem merely to propel the story of the male protagonists even when the story switches to their point of view.

The only other weakness in the book comes from her lack of empathy for those with strong religious views. Jehovah’s Witnesses are fairly easy targets, but she spends a lot of energy knocking them down. I appreciate her depiction of Euro-Muslim extremists as wanna-be gangsters without business sense, but the comedy seems like a veneer over a general inability to appreciate faith. Regardless of her faith or lack thereof, this is a weakness that I hope she overcomes in future books.

Willa Cather and Pearl S. Buck

My Antonia gets full credit for being a story about 19^th-century Midwestern farmers that doesn’t remind me of the Little House on the Prairie books. Willa Cather’s prose didn’t dazzle me, but it fit the tone, and she has some quotable lines. So why didn’t the book move me?

I found myself going back over the characters—all realistic and likeable, or at least sympathetic in some way. I went over the landscape and weather descriptions—all worthy of being painted for the cover of a lesser book. She occasionally condescends to her characters by writing the immigrants’ speech in dialect, but that problem’s too common to destroy a book over.

And then, around page 130, I saw it. First, I was going over these things before I was half-way through the book, so the world she wanted to create wasn’t quite there. Second, that I kept having to remind myself that the first-person character was male.

Willa Cather is not a man. That is a trait shared by many other great writers. With few exceptions, though, the other great women writers remember that they aren’t men and don’t try to write as a male impersonator.

This presumptuous fault stood out especially because I read My Antonia just after finishing The Good Earth, which is also by a female author with a male protagonist. Pearl S. Buck demonstrates quite a bit more insight into the human condition, but I suspect her insights wouldn’t have rung as true if she had written in first person.

My Antonia is billed as a coming-of-age story of a boy in Nebraska. But it’s not. It’s a story of how women wish men would come of age: friendly-like, and respectable, and honorable (with minor, attractive flaws), and no more sexual than a single overly-intense kiss, and no more violent than an occasional bluster and hair rumple. When male authors try to write a female character first-person, you can almost always be assured a sexual fantasyland. The opposite happens in My Antonia. It’s a portrait of a gelding as a young man. She just doesn’t get it.

“It” means the concern for appearance and honor and significance and legacy and power and sex that is part of being male. (Maybe it’s part of being female, too, but I don’t think it’s the same.)

Pearl S. Buck gets it. The Good Earth is a masterpiece, on part with The Grapes of Wrath or Nectar in a Sieve for showing the point of view of the rural poor. Buck treats her characters with compassion and respect, refusing to escape from their problems through irony or other forms of authorial condescension.

It’s tragic how little has changed in Asia since she wrote it. Sure, revolutions have come over and over, along with cars and the Internet, but you could still meet most of the people today. I can’t recommend The Good Earth highly enough.