On Beauty

Definitely witty, but not really lovable. This spot-on satire of the world of universities and academia is laugh-out-loud funny. However, I found most of the characters unlikable, and any attempts to make them relatable - Zora's unrequited crush, for example - just made them seem pathetic. I know that this book is an homage to Howards End, and some scenes are pretty much lifted from the original, but I think it ultimately failed to deliver Forster's message of "Only connect."

Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! After the brilliance that was White Teeth, and then the disappointment that was The Autograph Man, another brilliant one! (I wonder if this means that the next will be disappointing; does she alternate between good and bad?) A number of Big Ideas as two academics clash head-to-head over the hearts and souls of their families. None of the characters really win, or get off easily. The "baddies" have moments of beauty and love, while our "hero" is really a self-absorbed git who needs to learn to enjoy himself and admit that he loves the tomato. (And he's only the "hero" because I agreed with his politics.)

Smith bakes up a casserole of social critique, coming of age, various flavors of feminism and marriage, garnished with an academic feud. Sometimes I felt she was pranking the reader as she can be wickedly clever. Lots going on in this terrific read.

As an aside, the Penguin paperback copy I had was misbound with a dozen or so pages out of order which made for some rather confusing moments until I worked out what was going on.

The self-absorbed middle-aged white male academic who spends his time cheating on his wife and gazing into his navel is possibly the single oldest, most widespread, most tedious subject in literary fiction. But Zadie Smith does something really interesting with it: she puts that guy at the center of her novel, but then, instead of following him into his self-absorption, she opens up the world around him to us, showing us perspectives you don't usually get in that sort of story. We see what life looks like from many other points of view, including those of his down-to-earth black wife, Kiki, and their mixed-race children, each of whom is struggling to define their identity in their own very different ways. And Smith tackles a dizzying show more array of themes, from race relations to post-modernism to free speech, some of them directly, some subtly.

Her characters are great, too. (I have a particular fondness for Kiki.) Admittedly, some of them are better-developed than others... All of them feel real, but we spend more time getting to know and understand some of them, and it's often not the ones I expected the novel to focus on. It had something of a tendency to jump around from person to person, sidelining situations I expected to be more important only to develop others tangential to them, in ways that sometimes left me feeling a little-off balance, but ultimately I think it all worked surpriaingly well. show less

On the surface, On Beauty is about two families, the Belseys and the Kips. Both are academic families with the fathers holding positions as professors - Howard Belsey at a Boston college and Monty Kip in the UK. Not only do they differ in their opinions of art, they are radically opposed on the political spectrum with Monty holding up the views of a religious right-wing conservative and Belsey playing the role of the liberal academic. The characters in this book are diverse and complex and the issues covered are equally broad. Although the plot mostly revolves around marital fidelity, the book raises many questions about race and policies like affirmative action and the cultural divide between the ultra-religious and the liberal show more intelligentsia. Definitely a book that had me thinking about race and the loss of identity experienced in interracial marriage. My major complaint about this book is that it covers too many issues and seemed to lack cohesion or finality. But maybe the messy indeterminate ending is appropriate for our crazy and diverse society. show less

I wanted to scream at a few characters several times in this book, which I'll just put down to Zadie Smith's excellent writing and realistic characters. This is a tale of two families, who don't necessarily get along perfectly, but who live and work within the same community and have a strong connection. Humor is definitely present, as many characters end up in situations only one step removed from ridiculous. As I was reading, I had to double-check the publication date (it was earlier than I expected), as this novel clearly emerged from a particular era, but remains relevant (if not more so) today.

I enjoyed Ms Smith's White Teeth, but dont recollect being so blown away as I was by this novel!
The characterization is absolutely superb, as two dysfunctional academic families, whose fathers work in the Black Studies department come into repeated and various contact.
Self centred, unfaithful Howard Belsey already has a feud- politically and professionally-with Monty Kipps. When Belsey's son goes to work for Kipps- and starts a short lived but intense affair with the Kipps daughter, tensions rise. Meanwhile the two wives have become friends; and Belsey's student daughter has signed up for a class taught by her father's ex-lover...
Literary, entirely believable and utterly outstanding. One of the year's top reads, I think.