Zadie Smith, On Beauty

“Park the car in post-racial identity politics Harvard Yard.”

I’d read British author Zadie Smith’s acclaimed debut novel White Teeth, about postcolonial immigrants in London awhile back, so thought I’d take a gander at On Beauty, which also appears on multiple recommended lists.

In this installment, Smith hops the Pond to pen a tragi-comic drama about the family Belsey.  Howard, a fifty-seven-year-old boorish white British art historian, whose life mission consists of debunking Rembrandt’s genius (if he can just finish his book), still loves his wife, a beautiful, open-hearted 250-pound black woman from Florida named Kiki.  Howard teaches at a fictitious elite university about an hour outside of Boston called “Wellington,” which could refer to at least eleven real schools.  Maybe Smith combines the famed women’s college Wellesley with Babson, which is also in Wellesley?

Then, Howard’s arch-nemesis, a dapper/conservative/black/Trinidadian-British art historian Monty Kipps, comes to town as Wellington’s newest acquisition, along with his family.  Kipps wants Wellington to eliminate all their Affirmative Action initiatives, which raises Howard’s hackles up to his mortar board.  Howard’s mid-life infidelities add to the strain, atop his overdue tenure case.

The book thus becomes an exploration of how Howard and Kiki’s children handle these pressures.  Sometimes, people from two cultures feel that they have feet in each world yet full membership in neither, a feeling of in-betweenness that cultural critic Gloria Anzaldúa captures in her classic, Borderlands: The New Mestiza.  While Howard seems protagonist-ish, the heart of the book tracks the children’s quests for identity as they negotiate the crisis of multiple borderlands.

We don’t see much of the eldest Belsey, Jerome, since he’s studying at Ivy League Brown University, but he has become a strong Christian and doesn’t yet understand the difference between passion and love.  The middle child, Zora (a nod to Zora Neale Hurston, I’d assume), cuts a homely Hermione Granger-like figure.  An intellectual firebrand herself, Zora seems invested in success within the system, choosing to study at Wellington while sparring with its administration.  The youngest, Levi, lacks his siblings’ academic bent and instead relies too much on others to define himself.  At first, he haunts nearby minority-majority Roxbury section of Boston, which includes the hottest of the hot local rap scene.  After running afoul of his black manager at his record megastore job, Levi falls in with a crowd of Haitians who sell sketchy goods on the streets, taking on their anti-discrimination cause as his own (weirdly, I read this book while candidate Donald Trump made repeated racist false claims about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating peoples’ pets).

Rounding out the ensemble, Zora lobbies to have Carl, a gifted, charismatic black street poet who haunts campus like a child’s face against a candy store window, let into her father’s mistress’ popular poetry class.  Zora crushes hard for Carl, to her humiliation when Monty’s bombshell, sexually adventurous daughter enters the picture.

Smith does an expert job code-switching everything from streetwise ebonics to academic jargon.  She says that whereas Kiki’s wisdom comes from the heart, Howard calls a rose “an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”  As someone with a PhD in Theater and Performance Studies, Smith’s correct references to Baudrillard’s “simulacrum” didn’t faze me.

Smith can also do nature writing.  After a lengthy description of a North London landscape that would make a nineteenth-century naturalist glow, she characterizes winter in this way: “It is late December now; the Heath wears its austere winter cloak.  The sky is colorless.  The grass is hoary with a crunch underfoot, and the only relief is the occasional scarlet flash of the holly-berries.”  Lovely!

The testimonials on the back of the book confuse me, though.  The Washington Post characterizes Smith as a “postmodern Charles Dickens.”  I mean, sure, although I’d like to have a conversation with the critic about what they mean by “post-modernism.”  A rejection of master narratives?  Pastiche?  Emphasis on surfaces?   On Beauty operates in a multi/post-racial way perhaps.  It’s postcolonial.  The book I read didn’t seem postmodern, however, other than following the interweaving stories of multiple characters through the lens of identity politics.  Also, Newsweek thinks that Smith is “funny as hell.”  I didn’t find the chapters’ mishaps hysterical, but cringey, to be frank.

On the other hand, I may not be the best person to issue such judgements, since the book reads like a literary sit-com, and I got rid of my television in around 2008.  I don’t understand why my gym plays reruns of 90’s hit series Friends round the clock, for example (they had it on just today, in fact).  Lots of people love that brand of entertainment, though, so take my grumbles with a healthy grain of salt.  You’ll probably find Smith funny as hell too.

I will say that Smith could have done more research about how American universities function.  Having taught in them for eighteen years, multiple mistakes jump out at me.  For example, at one point Wellington hosts an annual black-tie dinner where students invite faculty as dates, and the evening involves Old World flourishes, including Latin benedictions.  I can assure you such Hogwarts-like traditions do not abound west of Greenwich Mean Time.  Smith makes an offhand reference that Wellington harbors Anglophile affectations (a true description of American institutions up to…about the 1940s, let’s say), which does not seem a convincing explanation. 

Elsewhere, faculty (and grad students) attend a drunken undergrad student house party, which I can assure you does not happen.  A Saturday morning on-campus faculty meeting?  No.  At the book’s climax, Smith describes a tenure process that I find unrecognizable—everything about it wrong.  Minor points, perhaps, but fans of thrillers would pick up on mistakes about military hardware, for example, and these unforced errors seem like they’d have been easy ones to check. 

I can’t fault the book’s craft, and I have to admit that, in true British fashion, after long stretches of low stakes, not-much-seems-to-be-happening prose, Smith floors the accelerator in the final hundred pages.  I got invested in Carl’s journey in particular.  We don’t hear much about aesthetics, odd given the title, although Howard learns his Very Big Lesson that, after all his mistakes, Kiki represents his best definition of beautiful.

Overall, not my cup of tea, but I would imagine many, many readers would love this book, so by all means enjoy its pages.  While you’re at it, read African author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, about a Nigerian woman who comes to study at a US university, also an acclaimed contemporary novel. 

Then, write a 5-7-page compare/contrast essay for me between Smith and Adichie’s approaches, with correct citations, standard formatting, and no ChatGBT please.