Whole tooth and nothing but the tooth

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Columnist William Leith has bad teeth. In his mind the badness of his teeth is somehow emblematic of the rot at the heart of Britain. He knows these two facts are not actually connected, but it's a fine little conceit and it gives him the opportunity to write this brief state-of-the-nation dental memoir cum polemic.

Leith's chief complaint is that "we can't tell stories about ourselves any more". As a nation, we apparently don't consider ourselves authentic or worthy of self-examination. (Though his book is its own contradiction.) British culture is "bitterness and envy ... Secret pride and showy self-hatred". We get by on fragile feelings of superiority fuelled by the underlying suspicion that everything British - from literature to plumbing - is inferior. We're dull and unalluring, too. Leith quotes Martin Amis on the subject of the poll tax riots: "Can you think of a more boring thing? Whereas in America every day you have abortion demos, gay rights demos, police brutality." Just look at our sorry films. Examine our terrible teeth. We have become that thing we most dread - an embarrassment.

Stylistically, this playful little book is Leith's most impressive piece of work. It is witty, finely observed and charming. His childhood choppers were "an anvil hammered with confectionery". His single years were dominated by soap-scummed sinks and gammy showers because "nobody who will sleep with you at the drop of a hat has a non-decaying bathroom". His description of dental abscesses is beyond reproach.

Leith's newspaper columns have tended to be easy and trivial, but here Leith makes a valiant attempt to "sink his teeth" into the argument. It's a familiar cry, though, and argued here without much intellectual rigour. Leith deprecates British self-deprecation while being its exemplar. And many of his examples are simply wrong. Britain does not look terrible in films. Britain looks terrible in low-budget films. Everywhere looks terrible in low-budget films. Leith does himself no favours by quoting Amis's shabbily cynical view that police brutality is somehow thrilling. Nor is it true that "we" (for which read the British middle classes) can't tell stories about ourselves any more. Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding are proof positive that we can. Leith may not like their stories, but that's a different matter.

All nations have national narratives which are, at best, partial and, at worst, hallucinatory. They are always clichés. The old canard that the Brits were "tolerant, fair-minded, self-sacrificing and incorruptible" has simply been replaced by a new one to which Leith vigorously and unquestioningly subscribes. British Teeth colludes in the fundamental simplification that we have become vicious dullards and crap at everything to boot. "Nobody believes you at first," says Leith. What nonsense. We Brits are all too ready to believe it.