On Beauty

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

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.

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 really enjoyed this and the way it riffed off of Howards End. Smith is such a generous novelist - the characters ,settings, plots, places, dialogues, ideas, everything just flows. It does peter out at the end though - I think all her endings do. Like she's not quite sure how to wrap up all that she started. Still, though, a splendid read that had me staying up late and waking up early to read an extra chapter.

This is a refashioning of E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and it is incisive and brainy in both premise and execution. As an academic, I greatly enjoyed the satirical treatment of the culture wars and values that wage on our intellectual stages. Everyone is unlikeable, which is the point, in my view. I suspect that your enjoyment of this book will vary with your enjoyment of literary fiction, but no one can deny that Zadie Smith is one of the great novelists of the 21st century.

When I say I am not a people person, I mean I can find five reasons to hate someone, anyone, within ten minutes of meeting them in real life. As consequence of this and the desire to not let overwhelming anger ruin my life, I am always putting myself in the other's place, years of which have both calmed me down and sharpened my analysis to the quick. However much I initially dislike you, I will always, always, always respect you, and if you're not a complete and utter asshole and/or hypocrite who never seriously considers what others have to say, I will reconcile myself with you in short order. The same goes for personas in books, which is why the whole concept of "likable" characters makes me laugh. If I factored that into my show more evaluation of literature, I'd be left with very few successes.

Despite what many of these reviews complain about, most of these characters are not assholes. Hypocrites, yes, but with a realness with which neither they nor the author may be condemned for. One of them is indeed a very typical asshole, but in such a fully explicated way that he is wielded as a veritable scythe through the ivory tower insipidity that is academia. This straight white male is a professor, a critic, a derider of custom and slayer of sentiment, so liberal in politics and so solipsistic in existence, able to get by in a world that encourages education without empathy at every turn in order to churn out glorified hipsters in the highest echelons of college campuses all across the US. In his eyes, nothing is sacred except for his dick, far more emblematic of a flawed society spewing out the same shit different days than any fault of the author, and which would hardly prove for a uniquely inspiring narrative had Smith not populated his world with characters that called him out on it at every turn. This includes the much objectified woman of his desires, who despite never having a share of that third person point of view is nothing less than fully and heartbreakingly human. Now that takes true writerly talent.

Now, I loved [Howards End], I did. However, the ending was too clean, too circumspect, too full of its own glorious aspirations to really ponder the implications of demographics on personal relations, and ultimately in great need of satirization. Teaching that book to students today will give you exuberant know nothings with nary a thought as to the twisting of privilege in the smallest facet of daily life, a truth fended off every second of every hour with empty courtesy, gentrified fortresses, and the avoidance of certain subjects. Politics, religion, pay check. Beware of the other side of the fence, less you find out how much and how so you use and are used. There's no success there, neither your money nor your life.

Liberalism tries. As Smith displays in full, liberalism tries, but is easily co-opted without complete understanding, or even the willingness to understand, for it is one thing to condemn racism and sexism and everything else and quite another to view one's life through the paradigm forever on. It is tiring, it is hard, and quite frankly who has time for all that when there's a 40+ hour work week and kids and taxes and pull up your bootstraps 'cause no one's ready or willing to coddle you no matter how much your nature and nurture screwed you over long before you were born. Never mind your beautiful passion for what society considers wrong for all the wrong reasons. Never mind the judgment based on white heternormative masculinity, women deepening their voice in speaking classes, black men fending off the fearful stares with constant reassurance, both expending energy that could have been wonderfully devoted elsewhere if not for their body and soul.

In the end, hate people if you will. Hate them, but always grant them reason to live. Always grant them reason to exist in your eyes, regardless of what promotions they have the power to make possible, what length of your time they are worth based on the connections you hypothesize out of the tone of their voice and color of their skin, how much you can squeeze out of them before going back to that circle habituated to whatever power you have as a youth/mother/daughter/father/son you call family. You have the right to living your life without actively seeking out danger, but do not avoid a chance to communicate out of guilt, or shame, or entitlement. You were compromised coming into this world by both privilege and oppression; you will gain nothing by splintering off in your own little bell jar of social justice.

If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

-Zora Neale Hurston

Humans are social creatures. There is, despite the hypocritical politickings, something beautiful worth living for in the halls of thought. Rome wasn't built in a day. In other words, go listen to some rap, or whatever other medium you have closed yourself off from without ever really knowing why or considering what drives your fellow human beings who so rapturously partake of it. Talk is cheap, silence is death, and we might as well like or dislike the tomato while explaining why; something may come of it yet. show less