On Beauty

On Beauty "Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore. Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it? Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed."
Customer Review: Zadie Smith's Best Novel So Far Echoes E. M. Forster and Rick Moody
Zadie Smith is a young brilliant British novelist whose best strength is in creating characters, such as Howard, Kiki and Zora Belsey - the main protagonists of "On Beauty" - sucessfully breathing life into them with a keen wit and sensibility of the human condition. She also succeeds admirably with several members of the Kripps family; husband Monty, wife Carlene, and daughter Victoria. Their tightly interwoven interactions are those often replete with ample mirth, which frequently left me laughing almost out loud, as I read about their interpersonal foibles. But Smith's skills as a compelling storyteller leave much to be desired, even though she has written a very good homage to E. M. Forster's "Howard's End", introducing academic politics, race and gender relations and rap music, among others, into a heady, occasionally fascinating mix. However, Smith tries too hard to emulate Forster's plot and prose, occasionally coming across as a second-rate version of Rick Moody, emulating his penchant for long-winded sentences and prose, which I find in her case too exasperating to comprehend (In Rick's case, he often has a sound artistic reason for his literary pyrotechnics.). Regardless, I can still recommend "On Beauty" to those unfamiliar with her work, since I find it a substantial artistic improvement over her literary debut "White Teeth". However, if I am interested in reading some elegant contemporary fiction on politics, race and religion, I'll have to turn elsewhere, to authors as diverse as Edwidge Danticat and William Gibson, not Zadie Smith.
Customer Review: Very flawed but very likeable
It's almost impossible to dislike Zadie Smith's writing because she's very funny and has a fine handle on character; still, there were so many strange flaws in this novel I kept commenting on them out loud with the friend with whom I was travelling while I read Smith's third novel. She seems to misunderstand entirely the way the American tenure system in private colleges works (it is impossible Howard Belsey would have the institutional authority and privileges he has and yet be untenured), and she also seems to have done little research on things as simple as American labor laws (a major subplot about one of the characters being forced to work by a megastore on Christmas Day is another impossibility in the US). And her re-working of many of the basic plot points of Forster's HOWARDS END are simply unnecessary, and force Smith to create all kinds of plot contrivances to allow the truth of Mrs. KIpps's bequest to come to light. The novel is most valuable as a study in character, and here Smith does not fail to delight: the characters of Howard, Kiki, and Zora Belsey are so funny and finely drawn that even with all the errors and elaborate plotting coincidences I've still recommended this book to others already. Yet it is a bit of a puzzle why by her third novel Smith should be making such elementary errors in her plotting research.