You are standing in front of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon," awestruck by the genius and the undeniable novelty of its perspective, when you hear someone behind you say, "Is this supposed to be art? It's just grotesque!"
Too often true beauty goes unnoticed. The dew-dappled blade of grass, a furtive glance from across the room, that plastic bag dancing with the wind - what is so distracting, so blinding that we let beauty pass unappreciated?
This idea is the foremost subject of Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty," though the extensive work also explores race, family life, marriage and the world of academia. Smith's voice is versatile and resonant, her writing modern and witty. In her most recent book, she masterfully weaves the many themes and unique character experiences together to tell of beauty both found and lost.
Smith's 2000 debut "White Teeth" enjoyed virtually unanimous praise, and critical acclaim continued with her sophomore novel "Autograph Man" (2002). "On Beauty" will not disappoint those familiar with these brilliant past works, though it is not nearly as experimental or overtly humorous. While opting for a far more traditional style this time around, Smith has not drastically altered or diverged from the recurring content of her works. The daughter of a Jamaican mother and English father, Smith examines race in all her novels, often in the context of a family and its interactions and relationships with other families. In "On Beauty" she explores this theme in a typically insightful manner.
"On Beauty" strongly parallels "Howards End" by E. M. Forster, "to whom all my fiction is indebted one way or the other," Smith admits in the acknowledgements section. "This time I wanted to repay the debt with hommage."
Both books encompass the interplay between strongly differing families. In "On Beauty," the two families are the open-minded, mixed-race Belseys, who live in Wellington, Massachusetts, and the London-based, ultra-conservative Christian Kipps clan.
Howard Belsey, a white English art history professor, and Kiki Belsey, a black Floridian hospital worker, have three children: Jerome, a Brown student and evangelical Christian, Zora, one of Wellington College's top pupils, and Levi, still in high school and still searching for his identity.
The story takes off when Monty Kipps moves to Wellington for a professorship, bringing his feeble but kind wife Carlene, his unbelievably attractive daughter Victoria and her protective brother Michael. Professors Howard and Monty disagree on everything from the merit of Rembrandt to the role of affirmative action. While Jerome deals with the love he once felt for the promiscuous Victoria, Zora falls for Levi's new rapper friend Carl. In secret, Carlene and Kiki form a friendship over tea, fruit pies and a love of art. The sometimes unexpected and always tragic relationships that develop between characters from both families form the framework for the rest of the book.
Smith portrays her diverse characters with great talent, switching seamlessly from bustling city to quiet suburbia, from the mindset of a conservative male professor to that of a fiercely liberal female undergrad. The way she simultaneously contrasts and connects the individuals she writes about sharpens the reader's understanding of conflict in the story and emphasizes its lack of resolution.
The most interesting technique Smith uses is the insertion of a seemingly unnecessary passage in the middle of the book. For about five pages, Smith tells us about the young and highly intelligent Katie Armstrong, who comes to Wellington on a scholarship looking for the intellectual environment she has always craved. Instead she finds a world of unintelligible jargon in which she is too scared to speak. Even when Katie spends more than enough time preparing for Howard Belsey's class, longing to express her passion for the arts, it is the gorgeous but shallow Victoria who captures the professor's attention.
Katie is mentioned only once and her situation looks to be at best moderately related to the other characters until the reader truly compares her story to everyone else's. The way that the cosmetic Victoria outshines the genuinely curious but shy Katie perfectly mirrors the way Howard rejects his now fat wife for younger beauties, the way Carl ignores Zora and Victoria ignores Jerome and how Kiki tells almost no one of the wonderful friendship she has found in Carlene. Though the characters are all surrounded by beauty, they either miss it completely or are unable to embrace it properly. Zora becomes obsessed with self-image, the talented Carl stops rapping, and Jerome idealizes his streetwise friends to the point of folly.
"On Beauty" is an engrossing and enjoyable read with a poignant message and memorable ending. And, since the fictional Wellington College is so close to Boston, Tufts readers will also enjoy the novel's references including Newbury Street, familiar aspects of college life, fresh snow and notorious black ice.
