On Beauty

Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington College. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths, and faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale.

Then Jerome, Howard's oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register.

Zadie Smith's third novel is a successful recreation of university life in New England. There are no lapses in credibility in her depiction of lectures, the staff room, nor any other aspect of academia. Dark undertones lurk under the veneer of respectability from Powerpoint to senate. Smith explores family relationships in a marriage between an ebullient black American woman and a middle-class English academic.



Howard Belsey is at that dangerous age conducive to adultery.He loves his wife Kiki, who is never stuck for words. Her statement, 'You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun!', typifies the racy fights they have throughout the novel.

The pace of the novel is fast. It opens just after Kiki discovers Howard's infidelity. The dynamic that ensues is what drives the narrative and the drama. The three Belsey teenagers are all streetwise and precocious, joining in with their parents' disputes with plenty of slapstick slang and Black American usages.

These are enhanced by being part of an otherwise eloquent register. 'Check it out man - she's having some kind of cognitive failure', Levi says to his mother, while Zora, his sister, berates him for being late, with, 'Starts at six, asshole - and you have once again failed to be of any help whatsoever.'

One constituent of this lengthy, wide-angled novel gave me problems. I suffered a big blast of deja lu - yes, lu, when Chapter Eleven transported me without warning to Forster's Howards End. There stands Kiki, as Margaret Schlegel, Chrismas shopping with her elderly friend Carlene - alias Mrs Wilcox. Carlene invites Kiki to her idyllically situated house, right now. 'Let’s go to Amhurst' says Carlene, 'Now - let's go now.'

It doesn't stop there. After this comes the scene at the station where the Wilcoxes close ranks and desert Margaret, - in this case the Kipps family desert Kiki. This is followed by Carlene's sudden death, the discovery of the legacy on a scrap of paper, the family conspiracy, and then the Forster style denouement.

Smith acknowledges that 'all [her] fiction is inspired by a love of E.M.Forster'. She writes: 'This time I wanted to pay the debt with hommage'. Is this a polite rendering of imitation being a form of flattery? Or is it a bit too tricksy for its own good?

This substantial borrowing from Forster is disconcerting, although not entirely gratuitous. The inheritance changes Kiki's life, although not quite as radically as Margaret's does in Howards End. In Zadie Smith's story, Howard Belsey's end is brought about by the web of his own lightweight infidelities.