'White Teeth' in the Flesh

By ZADIE SMITH

Can a television drama improve on a novel? Zadie Smith, the author of "White Teeth," finds out as "Masterpiece Theater" brings her story to life.

I'm pretty much finished now, but I'd like to say a quick rapturous word concerning something else that my fiction cannot do and film can: faces. Nothing disappoints more in fiction than the description of people's heads and faces ≈ their shocks of red hair and tediously broad foreheads, their wide even teeth or small pointy ones, their large noses, furrowed brows, dimpled smiles and on and on. Good facial description is too rare. Although Dickens left you in no doubt concerning Mr. Gradgrind's visage, and Nabokov's Pnin and his Lolita possess two of the only faces in modern fiction that I remember, what of the other great characters? Anna Karenina, Elizabeth Bennet, Joseph K, Janie Crawford, Rabbit Angstrom ≈ what do they look like? Having absolutely no visual sense, my Archie and Samad were completely blank from the neck up in my mind. I knew everything they thought, but nothing of how they looked. Here the TV show gave me something remarkable, made me exquisitely power! less and grateful. I could write another 2,000 words on the faces of Om Puri (Samad) and Phil Davies (Archie). The terrific, deeply ridged apple-pathways and pock marks of Mr. Puri's ennobling beauty (he makes things around him become beautiful). And Mr. Davies's exemplary Englishness: an open, plain, unassuming face that releases devastating emotion on a drip feed. I'm glad I had neither of their faces in mind when I wrote; they are so there I would have lost all the power I have, which is to do a little scribbling about what is not there, and never will be, unless I make it flesh.