Much of the pleasure of reading "White Teeth" is in the playful, riffing, bold yet controlled way Smith's prose moves. Her sentences are often juiced-up catalogs of words, images and expressions, with a vernacular rhythm that can convey the sweep of history in an almost offhand way:

November 10, 1989
A wall was coming down. It was something to do with history. It was an historic occasion. No one really knew quite who had put it up or who was tearing it down or whether this was good, bad, or something else; no one knew how tall it was, how long it was, or why people had died trying to cross it, or whether they would stop dying in future, but it was educational all the same. As good an excuse for a get-together as any. It was Thursday night, Clara and Alsana had cooked, and everybody was watching history on TV.

As the novel's point of view shifts seamlessly from character to character, we get a chorus of voices, from Millat's streetwise "Raggastani" argot ("I'm fuckin' wired, yeah? This whole business, man. This fuckin' geezer, man. He's a fuckin' coconut -- I'd like to fuck him up, yeah?" he says on his way to protest, for reasons he's not entirely clear on, Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses") to Joyce Chalfen's middle-class maternal babbling ("You'll stay for dinner, won’t you?" pleaded Joyce. "Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers!"). In "White Teeth," everyone may have his or her own private idiom, but Smith has managed to make them flow together; she's orchestrated a conversation that crosses the boundaries of race, age and sex.

Smith is just as interested in how printed words circulate. Like a DJ sampling sounds, she presents her readers with business cards, advertisements, lists, encyclopedia entries, press releases. There's a mock-heroic timeline of "The Post-War Reconstruction and Growth of O'Connell's Poolroom" ("December 1980: Archie gets highest recorded score ever on pinball: 51,998 points"); there's an excerpt from "The New Flower Power," written in 1976 by Joyce Chalfen. ("The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment ... Sisters, the bottom line is this: If we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand ..."). Smith is clearly having fun with all this mimickry, but it's also entirely appropriate to her larger purposes; you could say that, just as she wants to characterize contemporary England as a nation defined by its many intersecting cultures, she sees the novel as a heterogeneous, improvisational genre. (Skeptics might disagree with her on the former, purists on the latter.)

"White Teeth" is dazzling in a jazzy, modern way, but in its self-assurance it also calls to mind the capacious novels written during the 19th century, before writers, if not readers, lost confidence in the ability of the novel to capture reality. "Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories," Smith writes. It's a crucial insight into what a great novel should deliver, and the abundantly talented Smith has all the makings of a major novelist: She sketches her characters' inner lives in swift, sympathetic strokes, then swoops back out to paint a dead-on portrait of the place, the time, the culture in which those inner lives take place. And it's all presented with a generous good humor, a conviction that even in the dingiest corners and the most downtrodden lives there's something to be redeemed if you can find the right perspective.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"