The 12/22/2016 issue of the New York Review of Books brings news of Zadie Smith’s recent speech on the occasion of her receiving the 2016 Weltliteratur Prize (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/12/22/on-optimism-and-despair/). It is a rich, rewarding read, filled with understandable concern that multiculturalism, for all its flaws, might turn out to have been a historical period, rather than, say, a lasting understanding of and insight into democracy itself. Zadie Smith reports she is told her newer work is now less optimistic than 2000’s White Teeth was about multiculturalism. Smith suspects that, yes, her readers may very well be right. What I find interesting, though, is how this new reading retroactively casts the earlier work as positive in its multiculturalism. Part of what makes White Teeth so interesting is how its many ostensibly multicultural pairings have a tendency to go awry. Samad’s affair; Samad’s solitary pleasures; Samad’s separating his two sons, for a kind of cross-cultural experiment–one in England, one in Bangladesh. Chapter 17 of White Teeth ends with a remarkable set of paragraphs, reflecting on the experience of immigrants. The section begins optimistically with “we often imagine that immigrants are constantly on the move, footloose, able to change at any moment, able to employ their legendary resourcefulness at every turn,” and ends painfully with “they cannot escape the history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow” (384-5 in the 2001 Vintage paperback edition). I don’t know whether or not Smith would be reassured to know that it’s not clear she’s always offered an upbeat assessment of the experience of multiculturalism, but I myself find the complexities of White Teeth more important than a (guileless?) universalist assessment.