Book Abandonment: White Teeth and Out of Africa

Have you ever stopped reading a book in the middle?

I've always prided myself on finishing all the books that I begin. I don't like the idea of characters floating around in my memory, half-formed and, to my knowledge, fate-less. Did Dave die? Did Joanie ever find love? Did Xangar III ever return to his home planet? I hate the idea of not knowing, of leaving books and characters incomplete.

But I've been cleaning out my bookshelves and lugging unwanted books to the local Friends of the Library Book Sale bin. I've rediscovered two books that I abandoned over the summer: White Teeth by Zadie Smith and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen.

These are two very different books. According to the official Amazon.com review, White Teeth is about "race, sex, class, history, and the minefield of gender politics." This seems accurate; after reading nearly 100 pages of the novel, I think that Smith writes more about ideas like "race" and "history" than about characters with real emotions and real lives. The novel follows an interracial (and inter-generational) London couple and their Indian neighbors over several generations. This premise sounds like it should make for great fiction (clashing cultures, faltering marriages, alienated children, the ebb and flow of history, etc.), but instead the novel is vapid and slow moving. The characters seem flat as they move through the pages, spurred by unfathomable motives and faulty relationships.

Out of Africa is Dinesen's autobiographical account of her time running a coffee plantation near Nairobi. Dinesen writes beautifully of the Ngong Hills, East Africa's seasons, and the animals that roam her land. But the book never takes off, and it never developed enough substance to sustain me beyond the first 130 pages. Dinesen offers no storyline and no vibrant characters to grab onto, just a stream of vaguely racist observations about her African servants and how deeply different they are from her Danish self. She seems to keep her African "friends" at arm's length, and therefore is incapable of telling us anything about the Africans she meets except that they seem to be stubborn and fatalistic people.

Both of these books have undeniable merits (Dinesen's eye for detail is enthralling, and Smith has a vibrant imagination for characters with colorful backgrounds), but neither book delivers the kind of soul that, to me, makes a book worth reading. Dinesen can't depict anything beyond landscapes and caricatures, and Smith's characters present fantastically interesting surfaces that cannot disguise the fact that they, ultimately, are bores.

Out of Africa is considered a classic, and White Teeth won a slew of awards when it was released in 2000, so I felt obliged to give both of these books a fighting chance. But, for me, they were both unfinishable.

So what is my punishment for abandoning these books? I'm sure to be haunted by them every time I wander into a Barnes & Noble. They'll leer at me from the shelves, taunting, "Now you'll never know what happened in the end! You'll never know what happened to meeeeeee!"