White Teeth: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

At 6:27 a.m. on January 1, 1975, in Cricklewood Broadway, Alfred Archibald Jones is lying facedown on the steering wheel of his Cavalier Musketeer Estate, having resigned himself to suicide. Archie feels that it is only proper that he should die on this unpleasant city street, living alone at the age of 47. From the car, he watches pigeons flying above and landing on Hussein-Ishmael, a halal butcher nearby, and considers that the pigeons have an “instinct for the Unlucky.” They pass by Archie, however, since though he does not know it, luck is with him: “Somewhere, somehow, by somebody, it had been decided that he would live.”

The Hussein-Ishmael is owned by Mo Hussein-Ishmael, a large man who despises the pigeons. On this morning, Mo is swearing loudly at the pigeons and “playing cricket”—trying to hit them with a bat. He calls Varin, his trainee, in to help. Mo believes that one day, Cricklewood and its residents will thank him for his “daily massacre” of the pigeons, since the town is covered in pigeon droppings. He spots Archie’s car and asks Arshad, his son (and employee), to find out what’s it doing in his driveway, blocking the way of his delivery trucks. Arshad returns to tell Mo that Archie has told him that he is “gassing himself.” Mo storms out angrily, pushes down Archie’s window, and tells him, “We’re not licensed for suicides around here.”

Archie lifts his head off of the steering wheel as Mo yells at him. Suddenly, he has an epiphany, realizing suddenly that the world wants him to live after all. He begins to sob and thanks Mo profusely, then reverses his car and pulls away from the street. It is revealed that Archie attempted suicide because Ophelia, his wife—a “violet-eyed Italian with a faint mustache”—recently divorced him after thirty years of marriage. His marriage had felt like a pair of shoes that never fit, but are nonetheless worn “for the sake of appearances.”

Archie met Ophelia Diagilo in a Florentine coffeehouse in the spring of 1946, after he “stumbled out of the darkness of war.” She did not know that Archie can never maintain positive perceptions of women for long; deep down, he doesn’t trust them, and he is only able to love women who “wear haloes.” Ophelia also had a family history of mental illness, which she did not tell Archie about.

On Boxing Day, six days earlier, Archie went back to his and Ophelia’s home in Hendon to collect his Hoover vacuum cleaner, encountering Ophelia’s extended Italian family, who had come to help her. She had had a mental breakdown, and when Archie saw her, she was “curled up in a fetal ball on the sofa.” One of Ophelia’s relatives told Archie that the Hoover was broken, but he was determined to fix it. Yet Archie also began to feel that “The End was unavoidably nigh,” and he flipped a coin to decide on his own suicide—“heads, life, tails, death.”

However, Archie is neither a hero nor a martyr—the only people who can successfully commit suicide. Though the result of the coin flip ordered him to commit suicide, he ignores the omen and drives around aimlessly with the Hoover tube in his car (which he considers sticking down his throat in order to kill himself). On December 29, Archie meets with his old friend Samad Miah Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim with whom he fought “back when the fighting had to be done.” After meeting at O’Connell’s Poolroom, their new haunt, the men play poker “with only three hands”—since Samad’s right hand is a “broken thing.”

Samad tells Archie that marrying Alsana, his new wife, has given him “this new lease on living,” since she is young and full of energy. Samad moved to England in the spring of 1973 with Alsana, who was then 23 (while Samad is middle-aged); he decided to move to the same borough as Archie, and the two rekindled their friendship. Samad tells Archie that he has not met the right woman yet, especially because Ophelia is mad: she believes that she is the “maid of the celebrated fifteenth-century art lover Cosimo de’ Medici.” Archie reflects that hindsight is always 20/20, but he later decides that he cannot take Samad’s advice: on New Year’s morning, he decides to commit suicide after all.

The story jumps forward to New Year’s, as Archie’s car is filling with carbon monoxide. He experiences a flashback of his life to date and deems it dull and depressing; he remembers fighting in the last year of World War II, looking for work on Fleet Street after the war and being told that experience as a soldier wouldn’t be adequate for a job as a war correspondent, and ending up in a job at MorganHero, a printing firm on Euston Road that designs folded materials (envelopes and leaflets). This job is not much of an achievement, but Archie reflects that “you’ll find things need folds, they need to overlap, otherwise life would be like a broadsheet: flapping in the wind and down the street so you lose the important sections.”

Archie was once a competitive track cyclist, and in 1948, he participated in the Olympics in London, sharing 13th place with a Swedish gynecologist named Horst Ibelgaufts. Because of an error, Archie’s name was omitted from Olympic records, but Horst continues to write Archie, sending cheerful messages from Sweden about his family and his newfound hobbies (such as playing the harp). After their race in 1948, Horst and Archie got drunk and hired prostitutes in London, one of whom Horst slept with in front of Archie. Archie remembers the prostitute he hired, Daria, and before he blacks out, he thinks of the smile he saw on her face: “if there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance.” After leaving Mo’s driveway, Archie is ecstatic, speeding through street signs and choosing new routes he has never taken before.

The story changes to the perspective of Tim Westleigh, more commonly known as Merlin, who wakes up on the kitchen floor to his doorbell ringing. At the door, he greets a “middle-aged man dressed head-to-toe in gray corduroy.” Merlin asks if he is a traveling salesman or a missionary, and Archie tells him that he saw Merlin’s sign while driving by: a white bedsheet with rainbow lettering reading WELCOME TO THE “END OF THE WORLD” PARTY, 1975. Archie joins a table where “two black guys, a topless Chinese girl, and a white woman wearing a toga” are playing rummy. After many drinks, Archie feels intimately acquainted with the people he has just met, though they quickly fall into an argument about World War II that puts a damper on things. Archie wonders if he is the type of man who, far from being a hero or the center of attention, is “just there to make up the numbers.”

Yet something is destined to happen that will transform Archie: his encounter with Clara Bowden, a woman “beautiful in all senses except, maybe, by virtue of being black.” She comes striding down the stairs toward Archie, who regards her as “the most comforting woman he had ever met,” one who wears her sexuality “with an older woman’s ease.” She speaks to Archie is a lilting Caribbean accent, and he sees that she has no top teeth. Archie tells her that he nearly died today, and Clara solemnly tells him that “dis life no easy!” Suddenly, Archie sees a look on her face identical to the one he saw in Daria’s. Six weeks later the two marry: Clara is 19, and Archie is 47.