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Response to On Beauty by Zadie Smith

Assignment EIGHT

Zadie Adeline Smith was born on 25 October 1975. She is a contemporary English
novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her
ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give
voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative
from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys,
comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English
academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the
other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its
most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out
through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian
immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives.

White Teeth had a similarly heterogeneous cast, but whereas in that novel Smith kept it
together by keeping it light, with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and
Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded
to throughout, is EM Forster.

Forster's style, which looks simultaneously backward to the epigrammatic polish of Jane
Austen and forward to the looser, more discursive amplitude we favour today, resonates strongly
in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many beautiful descriptions and gently
ironic authorial interjections that frame and connect the bright pieces of Smith's mosaic. You can
hear it in everything from the stately scene-setting passages (particularly where rooms or houses
are being evoked) to the most incidental moments, for example where the lovelorn elder Belsey
boy joins his mother and her middle-aged friends at an outdoor festival: "Jerome, in all his
gloomy Jeromeity, had joined them. The ill-pitched greetings that compassionate age sings to
mysterious youth rang out; hair was almost tousled then wisely not ... "

More specifically, the plot of Forster's Howards End, ingeniously re-engineered,

underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty. The unruly Belseys, like Forster's Schlegels,
become embroiled with another family whose conventional household seems the stolid opposite
of their own. In both cases the wives form a surprising friendship that leads to a valuable legacy
being bequeathed by one woman to the other. And in both cases the family of the deceased
woman conceals the legacy from her surviving friend.

Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty
Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra-
conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a
popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a
more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was
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marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum
humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment,
exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt.
To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son
falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity
appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches.

With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-
sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope
for all the familiar farcical posturing’s so dear to the heart of academe. But while Smith does
indeed deliver a superbly wicked example of that genre, this is only a small part of her
achievement. Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following
Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression
(from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in
contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to
dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner.

But that isn't quite it either. The word "liminality", which a student of Howard's has to
look up at one point (she would have found that it has to do with thresholds and boundaries),
perhaps best expresses the driving idea of the novel and the source of its most powerful passages.
These occur some way along, after the plot has been laid and the book begins coasting on its own
momentum. They consist of a series of encounters in which the discrete worlds incarnated in
these highly diverse characters start colliding and breaking each other open. At its most basic,
the illumination that results is simply that of the surprise perspective - Levi Belsey applying his
hip-hop worldview to a casual thought about Richard Branson: "Levi liked the way the mythical
British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world ... " But in its more
sustained form this collision principle becomes a way of taking apart and investigating elemental
human configurations: parent and child, teacher and student (some of the most sensitive writing
I've read on what actually goes on in this particular relationship), black and white, employer and
employee.

A degree of psychological violence is always implicit in such mutual broaching’s: Kiki

Belsey's gravitation toward Carlene Kipps is a betrayal of her own husband; minor, but forceful
enough to set off a cascade of reappraisals of both Howard and herself in her own mind.
Sometimes the impact sets off a whole ricocheting chain of further encounters. Howard Belsey,
usually armoured with a sneer (or a snore) against anything overtly "sublime" in art, becomes
unexpectedly overwhelmed when a choir breaks into Mozart's Ave Verum at Carlene Kipps's
funeral in London. He reels out of the church, the shock of mortality reverberating in his head,
and finds himself wandering toward his childhood home in Cricklewood, where his father, whom
he hasn't seen for years, still lives. Here, as the conciliatory impulse gives way to ancient
antagonisms, a still more devastating confrontation takes place, and Howard careens off again,
first to a pub, then to Carlene's wake where, drunk and dazed, he allows himself to be seduced in
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an upstairs room by ... well, by about the last person on earth he should be allowing himself to be
seduced by.

A further pleasure of these charged encounters is the extraordinary vividness with which
they have been imagined. Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the
bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into
the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi
riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life.

There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels
awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit
uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed
bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip-hop moves to the gleeful horror of his
kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as
televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised
on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir
Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear
blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of
feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper-intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the
enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir
Monty, whose fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of
a punch.

But, with so much done extremely well, it seems ungrateful to dwell on imperfections.
Numerous virtues more than make up for them: characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast
poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp,
touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual
currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself, who starts out like an
escapee from a Malcolm Bradbury novel but whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening
and strangely sweetening his character. Above all, just the sheer novelistic intelligence -
expansive, witty and magnanimous - that irradiates the whole enterprise.

Addendum
Zadie Smith was born in 1975. On Beauty is her rare comic novel about the divisive
cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the
left. Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it,
to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be?
Blame it on her youth.

Those who were enraptured by Smith's startling 2000 debut, White Teeth will find that
On Beauty is almost literally a return to form. Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of
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two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial
and economic diversity. This time the city is not Smith's native London but Boston, or, more
specifically, the mythical outlying town of Wellington, home of a college of the same name. We
are pointedly told that Wellington is not in the Ivy League, but you can herewith banish all
thoughts of Brandeis and Tufts. The school's exasperating culture of entitlement, arrogance and
raw ambition, as well as a character or two, will be recognizable to anyone with a passing
acquaintance with Harvard, where Smith did time as a Radcliffe fellow after White Teeth put her
on America's map. Clearly her stay in our Cambridge, like her years as a student in the other
Cambridge back home, was fruitful, especially in this case outside the classroom. You'd never
guess she wasn't to the Adams House manner born.

"One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father" is the first sentence of the
book, a blunt declaration of Smith's intention to pay homage to Howards End. In E. M. Forster's
masterpiece of pre-World War I England, the collision of two antithetical families is set off by
the infatuation of the young, art-worshiping Helen Schlegel with a scion of the profoundly
prosaic businessman Henry Wilcox. Smith baits her own narrative mousetrap by propelling
Jerome, an altruistic teenage son of Howard Belsey, a left-wing Rembrandt scholar at
Wellington, into a live-in internship in London with his father's arch nemesis, a reactionary and
thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt and much else named Monty Kipps.
Much as Forster's turn-of-the-20th-century heroine finds to her astonishment that she likes it
when the Wilcoxes dismiss socialism, women's suffrage, art and literature as sheer nonsense, so
Jerome Belsey discovers in the Kippses' household that he "liked to listen to the exotic (to a
Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth,
and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream" and "thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from
God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned
left-wing ideologies." What's more, Monty Kipps has a very hot daughter who doesn't
necessarily abide by her famous father's publicly disseminated moral code.

The many delicious complications that ensue, not to be divulged here, compound by the
page once Monty Kipps, along with his wife, Carlene, and that daughter, Victoria, move to
Wellington for a visiting professorship, thus allowing Kipps and Howard Belsey to square off in
ideological and personal combat against the backdrop of the continuing fratricides of a liberal
university and its only slightly less liberal environs. What keep the political conflicts from
becoming didactic and predictable is, for starters, the principal characters, the Belseys and
Kippses themselves. Only one of them, Howard, is white, and even he's not an American-born
white man but a refugee from working-class London (humble roots he has tried to escape as
surely as Monty Kipps has distanced himself from his own island origins). Howard's Florida-
born wife of 30 years, Kiki Simmonds Belsey, is African-American, and thus the three more-or-
less college-age Belsey children are black, though not in all cases as black as they'd like to be.
Among the novel's several contrapuntal subplots is the continuing effort of the Belsey and Kipps
offspring alike to gain the friendship (platonic and not) of Carl Thomas, a Roxbury hip-hop wiz
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whom they worship as a fount of the "street" authenticity denied them in the hopelessly
bourgeois hood of Wellington. (As a plaything for the higher classes, Carl is to Wellington's
aesthetes what the lowly clerk Leonard Bast was to the Londoners of Howards End).

Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white
America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all-embracing as Wellington, they allow us to
view the wildly over plowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle. The
boilerplate political battles that buffet the campus, whether over affirmative action or the
grievances of the local Haitian community, are not as one-dimensional when both sides of the
argument are taken by those who have more than a theoretical stake in the outcome. Here, as in
White Teeth, Smith further lightens the load by exulting in the multicultural stew of her milieu
without turning it into course work in Multiculturalism. In her Wellington and Boston, as in her
London, the racial melting pot is an established fact, to be savored and explored rather than
mined for sociological morals. In On Beauty, anyone who is still arguing over it all at this late
date is a bit of a dolt, oh so last-century and a ripe target for farce.

That's the case with both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, both nearing 60, both
handicapped by their own ideological blinders. In life, neither of them connects much to
anything, including their infinitely wiser if long-suffering wives, their precocious nearly grown
kids and the art that is the platform for their careers as scholars. Howard's yearly seminar is a
tendentious running argument against "the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called
'Art,' "in which Rembrandt is seen as "neither a rule breaker nor an original" but as "a merely
competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested." Howard's own taste runs
to conceptual pieces too transgressive to be displayed in his own home. Monty, who announces
his arrival at Wellington by arguing in the local paper for "taking the 'liberal' out of the Liberal
Arts," reserves his greatest passion for punditry, not art, which he mainly seems to care about as
a commodity. He is fond of boasting that he owns "the largest collection of Haitian art in private
hands outside of that unfortunate island." Eventually one valuable piece in that collection, a
Hyppolite painting of the voodoo goddess Erzulie treasured mainly by his wife, will become as
symbolic a pawn in the two families' lives as the charismatic young interloper from Roxbury.

Smith is merciless about both Howard and Monty, the fatuous postmodernist and the self-
satisfied capitalist alike, and it's hard to say which is more ridiculous or reprehensible. Howard
has become the kind of academic who "could identify 30 different ideological trends in the social
sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was." For him a rose has long since
stopped being a rose but is instead "an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions
circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice." That he has "almost no
personal experience of pornography" would never stop him from contributing to "a book
denouncing it, edited by Steinem." So highly developed are his left-wing P.C. sensibilities that in
his zeal to smite Monty's challenges to them he becomes the campus's foremost crusader against
free speech.
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But Monty is no less a hypocrite, a rigidly conservative Christian who preaches against
homosexuality in public even as his best friend is a gay Baptist minister who delivered the
benediction at President Reagan's inauguration. His own brand of pomposity, like Howard's,
knows no bounds; he is "a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be
filming him" and has "this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative
occasionally have." Kiki Belsey in particular has his number: "Often enough she spotted Monty,
leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd 19th-century three-piece suits, with his
timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating." Out of both
curiosity and sympathy Kiki is soon driven to seek a friendship with Monty's elusive and
mysterious wife, apotheosized by one and all from afar as "the ideal 'stay-at-home' Christian
Mom."

The warring academics can be insufferable, but the novel as a whole rarely sinks to their
level, thanks to Smith's generous portrayal of the two families' often wounding private dramas.
It's Kiki, a majestically overweight earth mother with a feminist's spine, who gives the book its
biggest (but not sentimental) heart. A hospital administrator, not an academic, she is in
Wellington but not of it, despite her long marriage to Howard. Along with the Belsey children --
especially the ever-assertive daughter, Zora, a Wellington undergrad who emulates her father to
a fault -- she anchors the academic farce to a domestic reality beyond academe. As befits a farce,
sex is no small part of that reality in "On Beauty." However funny some of the couplings, the
human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire

Even so, the satire is not to be sneezed at. Smith has her own droll takes on the familiar
targets, whether she is dryly delineating the silken bureaucratic maneuvers of Howard's best
friend, Dr. Erskine Jegede, Soyinka professor of African literature and assistant director of the
black studies department, or describing faculty meetings at which the priority "is to try to get a
chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through." Though
Smith quite rightly puts greater faith in the students than the adults who have already mucked
things up, she hardly gives them a free pass. These are kids all too visibly angling for the fast
track to "an internship at The New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton's Harlem offices or at
French Vogue." The vestigial preppies make a brief appearance too. In one set piece, Howard
eviscerates the singers in a Wellington glee club (with their "F. Scott Fitzgerald heritage
haircuts" and voices redolent of "Old Boston money") with such misanthropic precision that he
almost (but not quite) makes you like him.

Smith is after so much in On Beauty that, as with White Teeth, not quite all of it comes
together at the end. And sometimes in the later pages the stage management is all too visible, as
in a climactic scene in which a political demonstration in the Wellington streets brushes against a
particularly tawdry extramarital assignation for diagrammatic effect. Nor does every character
have the weight of the Belsey’s; they intermingle with some cartoons. In her failings as in her
strengths, Smith often seems more reminiscent of the sprawling 19th-century comic novelists
who preceded Forster than her idol himself.
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But that's not always the case. What finally makes On Beauty affecting as well as comic
is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to "only connect" her passions with the
prose of the world as she finds it. For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries
of On Beauty, she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the
transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the
higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and
Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of
culture itself. But Smith and many of her other characters do, especially the young ones, even
those who are for now held captive by their iPods. Not for nothing does On Beauty progress from
an enraptured account of an open-air performance of Mozart's Requiem early on to a radiant
literary tour of the wonders of Hampstead Heath to the crowning image of a Rembrandt portrait
being projected larger and larger in a lecture hall until the "ever present human hint of yellow"
becomes an enveloping balm, however temporary, for all wounds.

Smith is roughly the same age as Forster at the time he published Howards End. No one
will confuse her voice with his, but her authorial presence is at the very least a channeling of the
searching heroine of that novel. Margaret Schlegel, Forster wrote, was "not beautiful, not
supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities -- something
best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she
encountered in her path through life." For all Zadie Smith's other talents, it is this quality that
makes you want to follow her every step on that path.