Street Smart.("Brick Lane" by Monica Ali and "Going East" by Matthew D'Ancona)(Book Review)

Literature has not been kind to London's East End. Dickens plumbed its wretchedness, as did other writers in titles like "The People of the Abyss" and "The Nether World." Yet these foul streets have long been a rich source of London's regeneration, channeling new blood, ideas and money into the greater city. The Huguenots, the Irish, Eastern European Jews, Indians and Bengalis, Sudanese and Somalis--they all passed through the East End. In such a place, it comes as no surprise to find a house of worship that began as a Huguenot chapel, became a synagogue and is now a mosque. Today, immigrants, artists and City traders coexist in one of London's most dynamic neighborhoods.

It is therefore fitting that a pair of summer novels--"Brick Lane" by Monica Ali and "Going East" by Matthew D'Ancona--should at long last celebrate rather than denigrate the East End. The authors themselves are emblematic of East London's crosscurrents: both are 35, Oxford graduates and first-time novelists. But Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and reared in England. A mother of two, she worked in publishing and as a copywriter, but says she didn't begin "dabbling" in fiction until three years ago. London-born D'Ancona is a leading center-right intellectual and journalist, currently serving as deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

Though Ali never lived in the East End, her background gives her a unique insight into it. The daughter of a Bengali father and a British mother, she is fascinated with the neighborhood's mix of rich and poor- -"a tale of two cities packed very closely together," she says. "Brick Lane," named after the iconic East End street lined with dance clubs and Bengali restaurants, is a perceptive account of an immigrant woman's self-discovery. An ecstatic Sunday Times reviewer said Ali possesses "a wisdom and skill that few authors attain in a lifetime."

D'Ancona actually lives in the East End. After he and his wife had their first child, he used to take the sleepless baby on long walks along Brick Lane, where he was struck by the sort of lovely, simple images that pervade "Going East": clubbers ending their ...