Zadie, You So Funny

Have you met anyone who didn't love every page of Zadie Smith's White Teeth? Because I haven't. In fact, I was so charmed by White Teeth that I never read The Autograph Man, her second novel. I know that makes no sense. I guess what I mean to say is that I didn't want to be disappointed, so I just avoided the second book altogether. But I like to catch the smaller things she writes--not essays, quite, but what I think of as "amusements." She has one--"You Are in Paradise"--in the current Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker. It starts like this:

If you are brown and decide to date a British man, sooner or later he will present you with a Paul Gauguin. This may come in postcard form or as a valentine, as a framed print for your birthday or repeated many times over as wrapping paper, but it will come, and it will always be a painting from Gauguin's Tahitian period, 1891-1903. Chances are nudity will be involved, also some large spherical fruit.

I've read that about fifteen times now, and it keeps cracking me up. You can read the whole thing right here.