White Teeth: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

The story shifts to Clara Bowden’s narrative,  specifically the story of Clara and Ryan Topps, who is essential to understanding why she married Archie. Ryan is lanky and redheaded; he drives a green Vespa and has few friends. Clara sees Ryan (with whom she attended St. Jude’s Community School in Lambeth) as a kindred spirit, even though other girls at the school find him off-putting. But Clara, too, is unpopular, since her mother forces her to try and convert her schoolmates to the church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Clara feels that she is somehow “going to save the heathen Ryan Topps.”

Hortense, Clara’s mother, tells her that not everyone can be saved, and asks Darcus, Clara’s father, if he agrees. He is an “odiferous, moribund, salivating old man” who seems unable to move from his armchair since a “mysterious illness” debilitated him upon his arrival in England from Jamaica 14 years before. Hortense eventually arrived with a 16-year-old Clara and gave Darcus “the tongue-lashing of his life”; ever since, he has been essentially mute. Meanwhile, Hortense is preparing for the End of the World—January 1, 1975, which Jehovah’s Witnesses believe marks the apocalypse. Hortense was disappointed that the previous “end of the world” date, in 1925, did not result in Armageddon. She believes that Clara must help out in the Witnesses’ effort to warn the world about the “end times,” since Clara is a “miracle baby” (Hortense had her when she was 48). Hortense, too, was a miracle baby, born in the middle of an earthquake in 1907.

On a Sunday morning, Clara is sent out with the youth group of the Lambeth Kingdom Hall (the Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation) to go “doorstepping” (going door-to-door to convert people). Coincidentally, she encounters Ryan Topps at one of the doors, and nervously asks if he is interested “in de teachins of d’Lord.” Ryan recognizes her as a schoolmate and invites her in; they have sex, and by Monday, Clara and Ryan are “dealing” with each other—or dating. Clara quickly realizes that Ryan wants a girlfriend who admires him and his scooter, but she doesn’t seem to mind: “the object of her passion,” Ryan, is “only an accessory to the passion itself.” Over the next few months, Clara’s mind, clothes, walk, and “soul” change, and she meets Ryan’s friends, a group of “Hippies, Flakes, Freaks, and Funky Folk” who smoke joints together in North London squats.

Clara begins to feel disillusioned with the teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and she wonders about all the people who won’t be saved when the world ends: she stops going to church and passing out church literature. One day, Clara has detention and misses her four o’clock meeting with Ryan. When she returns home, she finds him eating with Hortense, cheerfully chatting; soon, Ryan and Hortense are spending more time together than Ryan and Clara, and Ryan quickly becomes religious, egged on by Hortense. Clara realizes that “Hortense and Ryan were now trying to save her.”

Ryan and Clara go on a scooter ride across London and up to Hampstead Heath, where he tells Clara that he and Hortense are concerned about her: she is dressing “like a whore,” and smoking weed is evil. Ryan says that there is still time for Clara to be saved, but Clara says she’d rather be “sizzling in de rains of sulfur wid my friends than sittin’ in heaven, bored to tears.” The scooter crashes into an oak tree, and Clara’s top teeth get knocked out of her mouth. Ryan escapes without a scratch, believing that God has chosen him “as one the saved”—and Clara as one of the unsaved.

On New Year’s, Clara goes to Merlin’s End of the World party, but she feels melancholy throughout the night: she still longs for a savior, a man who can take her away from her dreary life in Lambeth. When Clara sees Archie at the party, then, she sees him as more than just a chubby middle-aged white man; instead, she sees him as “the last man on earth,” her savior.