"These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Like you were an animal finally housebroken. But you have made a devil's pact: it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere."

It starts with the suicide of Archie Jones. Or, the attempted suicide, because Fate, or Chance, or something out in the universe decides that Archie will carry on. In this case, the savior is an enormous brown butcher called Mo Hussein-Ishmael. A fresh start - the troubles, worries, misadventures, and losses of he past wiped clean, and Archie moves through London in a rootless haze, until he happens upon Clara, the beautiful, toothless young Jamaican woman he quickly marries.

From here, Zadie Smith (the 24-year-old British writer who's first novel's got agents and critics salivating on more than one continent) takes you through a tangled web of identity crises and cultural confusion that sprouts (not begins, mind you) from the simple, kindhearted, wishy washy white Brit Archie Jones. We're then led to Bengali Muslim Samad Miah Iqbal - WWII buddy and best friend to Archie - a man whose roots in his faraway homeland have him glorifying a past that never was, and cursing a present that has his kids caring more about Robert DeNiro, smoking pot, and changing their "ethnic" sounding names to Mark Smith than studying the Koran. Samad's stubborn in the truest sense of the word, and so is his feisty wife Alsana, a" little pressure cooker" who physically attacks him when things don't go her way. Headlocks and right hooks, fingernail clawing etc. They're a tumultuous pair who stay locked together partly for love, but mainly, it seems, because of their mutual status as foreigners in the West.

White Teeth's all about finding yourself in a world that you don't fit into - whether it's culturally, spiritually, physically, or mentally. Everyone's an outsider here. I fact, I've never seen the so-called "melting pot" depicted so gracefully and intelligently. Samad and his family are merely Pakis to the white faces in London. Archie and Clara are an interracial couple - and on top of that, Clara's a beautiful black woman with fake teeth speaking Jamaican patois. Alsana's eager to lose her accent. Samad's an intellectual that's forced to wait tables in an Indian restaurant that caters to whites. And the cultural tug-o-war goes on from there. But as the years fly by, it's the children of these couples that suffer the most. Irie is Clara and Archie's intelligent, overweight daughter, who hangs out with the Iqbal twins Millat and Magid throughout childhood.

Their threesome's abruptly split up when a frantic Samad (frantic because of the guilt he feels at fooling around with a white teacher at the boys' school) decides to ship one of the twins back to Bengal, so at least one of them won't be tainted by Western ways. He decides on Magid, the nerdy, cerebral one instead of Millat the burgeoning punk. So off he goes, into the night, separated from his family and the only home he's known. Initially the kidnapping feels awkward. It paints Samad as a fanatic, and as a terrible father. Eventually though, Smith reveals that he's desperate (and slightly fanatical) - Samad's the character who holds onto the past and to his religion so tightly that there's no room for growth or change. The struggle to maintain any sense of identity in white society forces him to cling onto his religion, and his outrageous ideals, and it eventually wreaks havoc on his family.

So if Samad's the stubborn, and hypocritical, anti-assimilationist, then Archie's, well, just Archie. He's the guy who flips a coin every time a decision has to be made - including whether or not to kill a Nazi POW during the war. Archie bumbles along, half Zen master, half village idiot. He has no concern for past or present, no crippling ties to his roots (he broke those when his suicide was botched and "Life had said Yes to Archie Jones"), so he's the peacekeeper. He has no concern for religion, unlike almost every other character in the book, and so he's the clean slate that the mess of the cultural melting pot can overflow onto, stewing in all the aggravation and soul searching that everyone else has to face.

Smith tackles so many issues in White Teeth that it's slightly daunting until you're about a third of the way into the novel and the web of time, fate, religion, family, culture, sexuality, belief, and identity comes together. She's never preachy - this isn't a dry treatise on immigrant communities or a rant about how white culture is evil, though all that's in the book. With a perception, humor, and care that makes her seem much wiser than her age, Smith proposes a not so new way of looking at the things that humanity's struggled with for eons: Just Be.

It's simple. Buddha knows this, Leonard Cohen knows it, your neighbor might know it, hell, you probably know it. But what Smith's getting at, which is so amazingly poignant, is that when people are displaced, without an identity, forced to mingle their selves with all the myriad faces and ideas of the West - it's almost impossible to Just Be. You have to struggle. You have to dig through painful layers just to find out who the hell you are. Are you a Muslim or a pork eating Guiness drinker? A scientist or a Jehovah's Witness? A person, or just a shadow in a world of white faces?