79 pages • 2 hours read
Zadie SmithWhite Teeth
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 4, Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “Magid, Millat, and Marcus, 1992, 1999”
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Return of Magid Mahfouz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal”
While waiting to meet Magid at the airport, Marcus notices a young woman reading a pop science book he cowrote. He asks her about it and is annoyed when she begins to talk about the potential ethical implications of genetic engineering. He is also frustrated with Joshua and hopes that Magid will be a “beacon for right-thinking Chalfenism even as it died a death here in the wilderness” (348).
Not everyone is as happy as Marcus to see Magid return. Millat refuses to stay in the same house as Magid, so Magid moves in with the Chalfens, which leads Joshua to move in with the Joneses. Irie has moved back home but is unhappy both there (where Joshua criticizes her for working with his father) and at the Chalfens’. Magid has become Marcus’s sole “confidant […] apprentice and disciple” (352) and handles the press surrounding FutureMouse, which Marcus intends to place on public display. Irie finds Magid’s demeanor annoying: “He had this way of smiling at you, neither wounded nor angry, and then inclining his head […] in a gesture of total forgiveness. He had absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse” (354). Joyce, meanwhile, is still preoccupied with helping Millat and insists that doing so requires the twins to meet. When Irie suggests that she ought to pay more attention to Josh, who has been traveling with FATE for months, Joyce says he’s “just trying to get a little bit of attention” and that Millat and even Magid have “real problems” (359, 360). As proof of this, she says she just saw Magid “sitting in the bath with his jeans on” (360)—something Irie sarcastically suggested he do when he expressed confusion over a pair of “shrink-to-fit” jeans Joyce gave him.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Crisis Talks and Eleventh-Hour Tactics”
Joyce visits the Iqbals, where Alsana accuses her of exacerbating the division between her sons. Joyce retorts that her own family has been split up as well and that the best hope for everyone is to arrange a meeting between the brothers. She also insists that Millat’s problems stem from deep-rooted trauma, but Millat, who is eavesdropping, is aware that his problem is a “split-level” consciousness (367). Although he has changed many of his habits and generally accepts KEVIN’s teachings—despite not fully understanding them—he has been unable to “purge [himself] of the taint of the West.” In particular, he’s had a hard time letting go of the mafia movies he has loved for years and secretly sees himself as a kind of gangster.
Despite her issues with Joyce, Alsana asks Samad to persuade Magid to meet with his brother. Samad takes his son to O’Connell’s, where Mickey is so deeply impressed by Magid that he agrees (unhappily) to make him a bacon sandwich. Magid invites Mickey to the launch of FutureMouse, saying the experiment could help develop a cure for the severe acne Mickey and his relatives suffer from. Samad, enraged by Magid eating bacon, says he does not think the two brothers should meet. Magid appeals to Archie, who flips a coin to settle the matter.
Joyce arranges for Magid and Millat to meet in an empty classroom at the university where Clara has been taking night classes. She sends Irie to fetch Millat, and the two end up having sex, after which Irie curls herself into “a naked huddle by the door, embarrassed and ashamed because she could see how much he regretted it” and Millat “[grabs] his prayer mat and [points] it toward the Kaba” (381). Irie then goes to the Chalfens’ and sleeps with Magid; she blames him for Millat’s problems and wants to “make [him] the second son for once” (382). To her dismay, Magid guesses why she is there and expresses sympathy.
Magid and Millat finally meet, and their disagreement about FutureMouse quickly devolves into a broader fight:
[T]hey make a mockery of that idea, a neutral place; instead they cover the room with history—past, present, and future history (for there is such a thing)—they take what was blank and smear it with the stinking shit of the past like excitable, excremental children (383).
Nothing is resolved, and “the brothers […] race towards the future only to find they more and more eloquently express their past” (385).
Chapter 18 Summary: “The End of History Versus The Last Man”
Millat and several other KEVIN brothers attend a speech by the movement’s founder, a Muslim convert from Barbados who calls himself Brother Ibrāhīm. Ibrāhīm is an uninspiring speaker, but the movement itself has tapped into a widespread frustration. For instance, Mo Hussein-Ishmael—the butcher who saved Archie’s life years earlier—joined because he was the victim of racist violence. Millat, however, is dissatisfied; he thinks KEVIN should be taking more direct action.
Around the same time, Joshua attends a FATE meeting run by the group’s cofounders, a married couple named Joely and Crispin. Joshua is infatuated with Joely and has been trying to sow discord in her marriage. During this meeting, he is so distracted by his fantasies that he forgets to take minutes on the group’s discussion of how to respond to FutureMouse. Crispin suggests that Josh might feel conflicted because of his relationship to Marcus, but Josh insists that he is committed to the cause, and the group returns to its debate: whether to “punish the perpetrators and educate the public” or free the mouse (400).
At midnight on December 20, Irie receives a call from Ryan and Hortense, who insist that she recognize the apocalyptic significance of the date and time: “twos and zeros” for the year 2000 (403), and the number 12 for the tribes of Israel. They announce they will continue calling her to try and save her soul, which is in danger because of her relationship to Marcus. Irie argues with them, and they say that they will see her at the launch of FutureMouse, where several members of the church plan to sing hymns and go on a hunger strike.
Meanwhile, FutureMouse has been born. Magid, who was present for the mouse’s creation, admires the total “certainty” of the mouse’s life path (405).
Part 4, Chapters 16-18 Analysis
FutureMouse is one of the most important symbols in the novel, and it plays an especially large role in Part 4. The experiment intends to demonstrate Marcus’s ability to predetermine an entire life’s trajectory through genetic engineering. Among other things, the mouse has been designed to live seven years (twice as long as normal), develop “pancreatic carcinomas” at one year old, and “lose all its pigmentation and become albino” at four years old (357). Magid sees the mouse in even grander terms; by controlling every aspect of its future, Magid believes Marcus has conquered not only chance but also time. Ironically, forward-looking characters like Marcus and Magid reveal themselves to be driven by the same desire as a history-obsessed character like Samad: to step outside of time and the changes it brings. Of course, the characters themselves do not recognize this similarity.
FutureMouse is opposed by groups like KEVIN and the Jehovah’s Witnesses on the grounds that only God has the right to determine a creature’s destiny. Ultimately, these objections prove beside the point because, like all other attempts to control the future, FutureMouse is doomed to failure. One clue lies in Irie’s observation that the mouse looks cunning. In other words, it seems to have plans and ideas of its own, implying that Marcus’s entire philosophy fails to account for free will. Smith suggests that it is not possible to entirely eliminate the random because humans often act in ways that are unexpected and confusing. The very presence of Magid and Millat in the novel is a testament to this fact, since the brothers—despite sharing the same family history and the same DNA—have become entirely different people.
Millat and Magid’s troubled relationship also speaks to another trend in this section of the novel: the breakdown of family. Magid, Joshua, and Irie all bounce from one family to the next to try and find a place where they can be comfortable. Josh and Millat continue to look to FATE and KEVIN, respectively, for a sense of identity, while Marcus withdraws from family life entirely. Like Millat’s “split-level” consciousness, these tensions and divisions are in many ways a smaller-scale version of the tensions and divisions caused by the clashing of different cultures. It is not until the very end of the novel that these divisions are symbolically healed in the form of Irie’s future family, which brings together the Bowdens, Joneses, Iqbals, and Chalfens.
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