On Beauty by Zadie Smith

On the back cover of On Beauty, there's a New York Times blurb: "wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed...a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane."

You know, I never thought I'd agree with Michiko Kakutani, but....

I really loved On Beauty. It might even be on the elusive list of favorites. At the very least, it's near the top of the book club picks. (No offense, James Joyce and William Faulkner.) Zadie Smith's third novel is so full of character detail, fantastic descriptive language, and genuine charm that it's easy to overlook any small flaws. You can barely even see the behind-the-scenes conceit, that it's a modern reworking of Howards End. In the hands of a lot of other authors, that skeleton would be painfully obvious, like dubbing southern accents over a Merchant Ivory film. Here, it's more of a pleasant realization that you're seeing something vaguely familiar, but still refreshing. Think West Side Story.

The book channels its Bloomsbury-era inspiration by exploring whether it's possible to break class barriers (even when your intentions are good), and looking at the small legacies we leave one another. It's set in academia (a Boston-area college that's like pretty much every college/liberal arts department we've all known and loved), and focuses on the Belsey family. The father, Howard, is an art history professor, a British expat, who gets off on university politics much more than on Rembrandt. His African-American wife, Kiki, is his feisty conscience. Their grown kids are born-again Christian Jerome, obnoxious college student Zora, and adolescent Levi, who wants to identify with ghetto kids despite his very middle-class family. They love each other, but they're not the happiest bunch. Howard recently cheated on Kiki with a family friend (and not a one-night stand floozy, as he told his wife). They're not really separated, but not really talking much, either. The kids are isolated, too: no one takes Jerome's Christianity, or any of his emotions, seriously; Zora is completely absorbed in her own little quest to dominate Wellington College politics; and Levi is getting deeper and deeper with a group of unhappy Haitian immigrants, while still pretending that he's going to school and holding down a weekend job. Plus, the family's nemeses, a rival British family headed by a Clarence Thomas-type who once insulted Howard in an academic throwdown, is moving in down the street.

The main plot of the story involves the Belseys moving outward and engaging both the upper class (the rival professor, Monty Kipps) and the lower (Carl, a talented kid from the Roxbury projects with a knack for poetry). The latter becomes part of a campus tug-of-war over affirmative action, and whether kids who aren't paying tuition through the nose can sit in on poetry seminars. The Conservative bootstrap effort is led by Kipps, while his wife and daughter fraternize heavily with the Belsey enemies. Meanwhile, Howard just wants tenure--but his wounded professional pride and his unfortunate libido keep him right in the miserable middle with everyone else. The crumbling marriage is the backdrop for all the chaotic dealings going on outside their house.

This indictment of academia is exactly what I expected/wanted from White Noise, and just didn't get. You don't need absurdism to highlight a system that's already absurd. You just have to describe it well, and Smith does that. She hits all the right character notes, too. Even less fleshed characters, like Jerome and Carlene Kipps (whose bond with Kiki pushes the plot along in very technical ways), don't feel too awkward. Other characters are spot-on--like Zora's pushy Lisa Simpson-ism as overcompensation for physical insecurities. And the poet/professor Claire, whose 60s-style politics and blithe narcissism reminded me of half the English professors I had in college.

But more than anything, I really loved Smith's prose. She has an amazing way of distilling the essence of things into a sentence or two that smacks you right in the face with its accuracy. By the end of the book, I wasn't even tired of the Belseys. I'd gladly read follow-up stories about them. Maybe not another whole novel, but some short stuff in the New Yorker or something. And I enjoyed this one much more than White Teeth. I look forward to what Smith comes up with next.

It was hard to pick favorite parts, but since it would be a shame to waste the Post-It flags littering my copy....

"Jerome said, 'It's like, a family doesn't work any more when everyone in it is more miserable than they would be if they were alone. You know?' Kiki's kids always seemed to say 'you know' at the end of their sentences these days, but they never waited to find out if she did know. By the time Kiki looked up, Jerome was already a hundred feet away, tunnelling into the accepting crowd."

"Mozart's Requiem begins with you walking towards a huge pit. The pit is on the other side of a precipice, which you cannot see over until you are right at its edge. Your death is awaiting you in that pit. You don't know what it looks like or sounds like or smells like. You don't know whether it will be good or bad. You just walk towards it. Your will is a clarinet and your footsteps are attended by all the violins."

"God knows, even the story he ended up giving--a one-night stand with a stranger--had caused terrible damage. It broke that splendid circle of Kiki's love, within which he had existed for so long, a love (and it was to Howard's credit that he knew this) that had enabled everything else."