Aha. That could be a problem, yes... what's it about?

It "got" me too in the sense of surprising me, but I'm generally not a fan of that. I don't usually like it when seemingly established narrative gets overturned like that - it's one thing to leave out details until the very end that make you see everything that came before in a very different light (like in Never Let Me Go to some extent), but quite another to decide that what happened before didn't even happen.

Regardless of that, though - like I said, I liked the book, but wouldn't call it a real masterpiece in any case. It's a bit disjointed, too, I thought... the chapters of Robbie at war are pretty good, but almost seem like an entirely different book.

Yeah... I can see how one could argue it's the best book in terms of character development and theme development - helped of course by the absence of the quest for various items that dominates the plot of the last two books and reduces their real world relevance to some extent.

I certainly recommend them. Although what with your personal situation, you might perhaps be more interested in Zadie Smith's other book that I read recently, On Beauty, which has a lot about relations between Brits and Americans and their differences in culture. In White Teeth it's more about the various immigrant communities in Britain (mostly Jamaican/West Indian and Pakistani).