On Beauty A Novel [Hardcover]

Starred Review. Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century–style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys;Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American;and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke;that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt;allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect;," but one that finds new substance here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Adult/High School–A hilarious comedy of manners in the tradition of Austen, Wharton, and Forster, to whom the author pays homage. She tackles class, race, and gender with acerbic wit and a wise eye for the complexities of modern life, in a 21st-century update of Howards End. Beauty opens as hapless art historian Howard Belsey, a transplanted Englishman married to an African-American woman, returns to London to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of his academic rival, Monty Kipps. Jerome has fallen in love not just with Victoria, but with the entire family, whose Trinidadian, right-wing roots are a sharp contrast to the freewheeling liberalism of his own family. In the meantime, Belseys other children, social activist Zora and Levi, who speaks only street slang and fancies himself from the hood, are each seeking the commitments and identities that will define their own lives. What results is a vivid portrait of marriage, family, the conflict between the political and the personal, and peoples eternal affinity for self-deception. Teens will enjoy this romp through the labyrinth of relationships that help a family mature and find its beautiful moments.–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Smith's first novel, White Teeth (2000), won prizes and comparisons to Dickens and E. M. Forster. In her current novel, she even uses a couple of plot devices from Howard's End to brilliant effect. The Belsey family is multicultural as well as multinational. Howard is English, teaching art history at liberal Wellington College near Boston. His wife, Kiki, is from Florida, and as practical as her husband is intellectual. Although they love each other dearly, Howard's waning career and wandering eye have caused a strain. Their children follow their own paths: Jerome is a Christian; Zora is a socially concerned intellectual; and Levi is trying to be a black man of the streets. When Jerome falls in love with the daughter of Howard's archrival, Monty Kipps, the two families are thrown together in a personal and cultural battle. Although the romance sours, Howard and Monty's rivalry kicks up a notch, while Kiki and Mrs. Kipps develop an unlikely bond. Intermingled with the analysis of family and marriage are commentaries on affirmative action, liberal versus conservative, and prejudices in many forms. This is a boisterous, funny, poignant, and erudite novel that should firmly establish Smith as a literary force of nature. Elizabeth Dickie
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

London's literary world-and so by extension Britain and Ireland's, for better or worse-is currently in the grip of a tussle over the role (or purpose) of poetry. This is not new, as each literary period offers a Dryden or Eliot to steer the course, away or towards certain styles, certain prescribed limits for figurative language. In late November this year, George Szirtes took the stage for the annual T.S. Eliot lecture, intending to defend poetry as a potentially democratic open space, relevant to all, from the likes of Don Paterson, who, so it is said, would rather poetry were kept professional (that is, expertly crafted) and reserved for the best. This might seem an odd beginning for a review of two new prestigious novels, if it weren't for the fact that the way the literary establishment, in general, views poetry and prose is very much at the heart of how these books have been received, and why they should (or should not) be read.
The Man Booker Prize is famous. Canadians, even, have won it, and, after decades of being up there with the Nobel and a handful of other international awards for writing, it has assumed an unquestionable status. So it is that novels shortlisted for the "Booker" (as it is lovingly called; "Man" should ask for their money back) always, these days, receive special notice. The Sea and On Beauty were not precisely head-to-head competitors this year, if only because it was brightly assumed that Banville's book was not in serious contention. Indeed, The Sea won by the slimmest of margins, with the head of the jury casting the deciding vote to break a tie. Immediately there was disharmony and uproar, and it was widely put about that Banville's prose was "too poetic", "complex" and "difficult"-but, unlike the other books, it had something Joycean in it that would make it "last".
I wish to stop here a moment to observe that a sad day is dawning when, having essentially moved away from any authentic engagement with poetry qua poetry in their intellectual lives, critics and pundits from that most literary of places, London, now generally recoil from having any of it (poetry that is) creep in to their fiction. This is borderline idiocy, and a sure sign of the decline of literate British society, which is a victim of an interminable media-orouboros, swallowing its own self-reflecting tail far too often.
The truth is that prose also partakes of poetic language, and that the finest prose stylists employ symbol, rhythm, simile, personification, and almost every other rhetorical device in the book. However, the truly "literary novel"-in short, the novel that knows as much about poetry's traditions as fiction's-is less welcome each month, perhaps because it eludes the marketer's canny grasp, and furrows the brows of those who prefer J.K. to T.S. Books lucidly written with "gripping stories" are still the ones that publishers and the public mainly seem to want, as prototypes for scripts Hollywood will eventually transubstantiate into that curious admixture of dross, sweat and filthy lucre that is the average screen adaptation.
Having read both The Sea and On Beauty, I am presented with what all reviewers dream of, the clear dichotomy. These books are not simply worlds apart, in terms of theme, tone, emphasis; they actually offer utterly different ways of thinking about how the world should be engaged with, morally and aesthetically, in language. This is perhaps the single most important element of writing-and precisely why polite men and women still get up on stages to argue for what the limits of poetic language should be.
Don't get me wrong. Zadie Smith is a talented, witty writer, and her book is rather amiable; indeed, it fairly glows with a sort of humane appreciation for people, places and things. Her imagination, like some latter-day Crusoe, is forever up to the task of finding just the apt phrase for describing an academic's fat wife, nimble shoulder blades, Mozart's Requiem, or a mottled green-glass window. She tosses in aphorisms with the vim of Oscar Wilde, and they often hit home. For example: "each couple is its own vaudeville act".
She is good at plot and characterization, and, as has been said elsewhere, the book's loving homage to E.M. Forster represents something of a happy milestone for the mainstream novel in Britain. But, dear me, is it dull. Not dull in the conventional sense, since the book is engaging, but in the sense, hinted at above, and to be teased out below: dull because, unlike Banville, the language does not dive into the deep end of either the human condition, or the full seriousness (however aesthetically playful) of what is at stake when writing is essayed. To make myself plainer here, On Beauty, with all its coy references to the author's husband and his (lacklustre) poetry, its cod-erudite involvement with the world of art history (she is no E.H. Gombrich, yet), and engagement with American university life, is about as genuine as a revival meeting in some prairie town circa 1932. The enthusiasm, energy and will to be wonderful are all in place, but the ultimate result is as deep as a magazine article on a war zone written by a celebrity.
Arguably, what is most grating is its time-out quality, the breezy whirlwind attempts to do a 21st century de Tocqueville in a sound-byte. Brits are famously torn in their appreciation and condemnation of the American sublime (they won't let Roth compete in the Booker because they think he'd always win). They are forever jetting to New York to find something gritty and big to write about, something with real weather and religion in it, and bingo, this is Zadie's version. You want to say, as Eliot in Waste Land, "She does the Yanks in different voices".
Smith is tremendously famous and respected for her age (she is in her early 30s), and bears some sort of resemblance to her generation in Britain, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did to his in America. The precise difference is that no one recognized it then. Not only was Fitzgerald the glitteringly brilliant chronicler of the superficial aspects of his moment, he was a stylistic genius, and, as if that wasn't enough, a tragic visionary. Smith is, no less than Banville, interested in style. She is a satirist as well-or, at the least, a hugely successful humorist, with laugh-out-loud set pieces calibrated expertly. However, she is not willing to allow either her style or her satire to bare its fangs to the degree needed to exceed the average reader's speed limit (to yoke a few images violently together). She doesn't have an expert, luscious command of language at this stage of her career, and too often her stock phrases, her constructions, verge on the sort of first-thing-to-hand flatness one sees in every novice's creative writing portfolio.
How else to explain "she stood like a zombie", or "her lips pulling away from her rosy gums to reveal her expensive American teeth"? The title of White Teeth, Smith's breakthrough debut notwithstanding (cheeky postmodernism perhaps), it is a lazy observation, and the zombie trope is sub-sub-Buffy. When Smith tries to catch the hyper-hip argot that is so-last-minute America, always just-fled, on the fly, Google-made, TV-led, water-cooler-now, she falls face forward, fighting with her countervailing Oxbridge tendency to pull back when all should be zip and flow.
Damning with faint praise though this may be, On Beauty is nevertheless that coveted thing, "a good read". It resists the thoroughly demonic possibilities of the greatest books in favour of being merely well-received, much-liked, and soon, no doubt, oft-imitated. On the other hand, The Sea is a misanthropic work of genius, and takes its place, consciously, and at times infuriatingly, in the elegant, eloquent pantheon of truly great masterworks of style of the modern period, often consciously referencing them in the process: The Great Gatsby, Black List: Section H, The Big Sleep, Lolita, Waiting For Godot, etc.
Todd Swift (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

What are the truly beautiful things in life—and how far will you go to get them?

Howard Belsey is an Englishman abroad, an academic teaching in Wellington, a small college town in New England. Married young, thirty years later he is struggling to revive his love for his African-American wife, Kiki. Meanwhile, his three teenage children-Jerome, Zora and Levi-are each seeking the passions, ideals and commitments that will guide them through their own lives.

After Howard has a disastrous affair with a colleague, his sensitive eldest son, Jerome, escapes to England for the holidays. In London he defies everything the Belseys represent when he goes to work for Trinidadian right-wing academic and pundit, Monty Kipps. Taken in by the Kipps family for the summer, Jerome falls for Monty's beautiful, capricious daughter, Victoria.

But this short-lived romance has long-lasting consequences, drawing these very different families into each other's lives. As Kiki develops a friendship with Mrs Kipps, and Howard and Monty do battle on different sides of the culture war, hot-headed Zora brings a handsome young man from the Boston streets into their midst whom she is determined to draw into the fold of the black middle class—but at what price?

Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant look at family life, marriage, the collision of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's self-deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.

Zadie Smith was born in northwest London in 1975 and still lives in the area. She is the prize-winning author of White Teeth and The Autograph Man.

Zadie Smith is either the ultimate nightmare for a narrator or a gift from the audiobook gods. Her characters are a stew of ingredients from all regions of the English-speaking world: London intellectuals and street toughs, Haitians, African immigrants, New Englanders, Southerners, urban hip-hop poets. And in this virtuoso author's reimagining of E.M. Forster's HOWARD'S END, these characters interact repeatedly, forcing instantaneous switches from one dialect or accent and right back again. Smith's third novel revolves around Howard Belsy, a British academic teaching college in Boston, his African-American wife, Kiki, and their three headstrong teenaged children. Happily, James is up to the challenge and, even more commendably, never stoops to mawkish, exaggerated voicings. Even while ably negotiating a diverse cast, he never diverts attention from Smith, the rightful star. M.O. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.