Zadie Smith's charming, playful debut novel, ''White Teeth,'' follows a group of immigrants and their offspring around contemporary London. Grant got the prize, but some people said it was because Smith had effectively removed herself from the running by insulting one of the judges, the wife of a Tory politician known for his anti-immigrant stance. Life is not a contest and neither is art.
All writers deserve prizes, if only for trying.
The author of three previous books, Grant zeroes in on the year 1946, when hundreds of thousands of concentration camp survivors remained in Europe while the British blocked Jewish immigration to Palestine. Americans know the story from Leon Uris's novel ''Exodus'' and its movie adaptation. In the author's view, Jewish courage, resilience and self-invention are inseparable from Jewish divisiveness and moral blindness. The Arab voice is never heard. But too much is sacrificed to the forward momentum, with whole eras reduced to simple-minded anecdotes or catalogs.