On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Summary
The Belseys of Wellington, a college town outside Boston, are a mixed family in every sense: Howard, a white English art historian who has built a career on debunking Rembrandt, his African American wife Kiki, a hospital administrator of large heart and larger patience, and three children each conducting a separate experiment in identity, Jerome in Christianity, Zora in academia, Levi in the streets Wellington pretends not to have. Into their orbit moves Howard's nemesis: Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian British conservative culture warrior, with his gentle wife Carlene and dangerous daughter Victoria.
Smith runs the two households into each other at every level. Jerome falls for Victoria first; Howard, catastrophically, follows; Kiki and Carlene, the two wives, form the book's one honest friendship, and Carlene's deathbed bequest to Kiki of a Haitian painting, which the Kipps family quietly suppresses, becomes the plot's hinge. Around the families Smith builds the campus itself, hearings on affirmative action, a poetry class harbouring one genuine talent from outside the gates, and Howard's lectures, which have stopped believing in beauty just as his life fills with evidence of it.
The whole architecture is borrowed, openly and joyfully, from Howards End, transposed a century and an ocean: the book opens with Jerome's emails home exactly where Forster opened with Helen's letters, and the bequest and the two families both have their originals.
Around four hundred and forty pages, warm, talkative and very funny.
Best for readers who want the campus novel at full orchestral size, and the rare state of the nation book whose nation is a marriage.
Historical Context & Significance
On Beauty won the Orange Prize in 2006, having already been shortlisted for the 2005 Booker, and it settled the question Zadie Smith's debut had raised: White Teeth, published when she was twenty four, had been the most hyped first novel of its generation, and the campus book proved the talent was structural, not just vocal. The New York Times later ranked it among the hundred best books of the century so far.
The Howards End scaffolding was declared in the book's acknowledgement to Forster, and reviewers enjoyed mapping the correspondences; the deeper borrowing is Forster's subject, the moral education of people who believe themselves finished.
Smith's career since has run on both tracks the book contains, novels, NW and Swing Time and The Fraud among them, and essays, where her standing as a critic now rivals her standing as a novelist. She has never needed the prize circuit since, which makes this early sweep look, in retrospect, like the establishment getting its verdict in on time.