Zadie Smith's On Beauty clearly owes much to E.M. Forster's novel, Howard's End. The similarities are obvious from the opening line -- a veritable mime of Forster's opening, despite the replacement of "letters" with the more contemporary "e-mails." One wonders whether originality is being strangled amid all this straight-laced literary homage, but the surprising result is that Smith's third work is, despite its faults, a wholly engrossing comic novel.
To compress On Beauty into a neat little nutshell is impossible. Like Smith's first novel, White Teeth, her third is a sprawling transcontinental canvas dotted with wild characters. What makes this particular work so poignant is the particular universe in which it is set: the brutal, bloody battlefield of academia.
Our warring camps in this case are two families, the Kipps and Belseys. The former are a conservative Christian clan led by the irascible, uptight Monty Kipps, who travels across the pond to give a series of lectures at Wellington College, the intellectual stomping grounds of his chief rival, Howard Belsey. Howard is the patriarch of the latter family, the captivating polar opposite of the Kipps family. Thankfully, Smith spends most of her narrative time with the Belseys.
Downtrodden fathers, slighted wives, teenagers at the mercy of their own uncontrollable culture -- each of these and more (the classy poetess instructor, the undergraduate-student-as-Lolita, to name just a couple) wind their paths in and around each other throughout the length of On Beauty. Some storylines gel, others barely hold together, but almost all are entertaining and are evidence of Smith's skills as not only a comic, but a multicultural writer.
Where else but in a Zadie Smith novel would diverse races and cultures so seamlessly blend as to seem natural? Smith's strength as a writer is that she both celebrates and criticizes, but never showcases her characters as emblems or stand-ins for ethnic or cultural groups.
Oddly enough, it is the field of academia that is treated the harshest. Take, for example, a scene in which Howard waits to speak at a faculty meeting:
"[Howard] was not up to bat yet. He was third on the agenda, absurdly ... But first, the Welsh-born classicist and temporary Housing Officer Christopher Fay in his harlequin waistcoat and red trousers must speak for an unendurable amount of time about meeting-room facilities for graduates. Howard took out his pen and began to doodle on his notes, all the time straining to simulate a pensive look on his face that would suggest an activity more serious than doodling."
Despite the biting satire, the clever wit, and the not-so-subtle jabs at the world of academia, On Beauty contains moments that, while bordering on Hallmark-ian, remain affecting. Perhaps the best of these is a chance public encounter between the three Belsey children: Zora, Levi and Jerome. It's a random day, and the three retire to a café for a spell before Smith's whirlwind narrative scatters them off into the far corners of experience.
As Jerome recalls of his siblings, "He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love; they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away."
Passages such as these confirm that Smith is a writer here to stay.
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