On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Penguin, 464 pp., $25.95
IS THERE AN EDITOR IN the house? If you are afflicted by the fogeyish notion that the red pencil has fallen out of fashion in today's publishing firms, you had best avoid the page-long acknowledgments at the beginning of Zadie Smith's third novel. Howards End, which provides the explicit inspiration for On Beauty, was content to introduce itself with that brief but celebrated admonition: "Only connect." Smith's effusions ("Thank you, George. You're a bobby dazzler . . . ") are much more reminiscent of the interminable hugs and kisses that adorn albums by contemporary R&B singers. "Blessings on Tishawna, my inspirational manicurist . . . " You know the kind of thing.
"Thank you to India Knight and Elisabeth Merriman for all the French." (India Knight being one of Britain's most fashionable newspaper columnists.) "All the French" might imply that we are about to encounter acres of Gallic prose. In fact, I would calculate that the entire amount comes to not much more than half a page of unexceptional conversation. While I don't begrudge India and Elisabeth their chance of literary immortality, the assignment fell quite a way short of a volume of Proust.
Why dwell on such trivial points? Well, simply because On Beauty is an immensely interesting novel that would have been even more satisfying if Smith had reined in her extraordinarily fluent muse. Rightly short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, her meditation on race, class, and the academic life makes most British novels seem flat-footed.
There is a genuine, restless intelligence at work here. There's no question that her debut, the even more garrulous White Teeth, benefited from a blast of multi-culti-tinged hype. Young, female, photogenic, Cambridge-educated, streetwise, and "urban" (or "half-urban," to borrow a euphemism from that magnificent sitcom The Larry Sanders Show), Smith was very much a publicist's dream. Yet for all the adulation, she has demonstrated a refreshing measure of self-awareness, assessing her first book's shortcomings in sometimes brutally dismissive terms. Refusing to be seduced by the media storm--even though she is happy to pose for the ritual glossy magazine photographs--she has managed to avoid being distracted from the harsh business of getting words down on the page.
On the face of it, her decision to transplant the drama and mores of E.M. Forster's era to the modern day might seem to be fraught with problems. "One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister," runs Forster's opening sentence. Smith's first line is almost identical, only now we live in an age where we dash off emails, sometimes with smiley-face symbols attached. A sense of clever, undergraduate pastiche hangs in the air, but only for a moment or two. Using Forster's storyline as a loose framework, Smith ingeniously creates a self-sufficient work that gives off no odor of late nights in the research library.
True, it's quite possible to spend the entire novel ticking off references to Forster: an al fresco Mozart Requiem takes the place of Beethoven at the Queen's Hall; the humble clerk Leonard Bast, eager to acquire Culture with a capital "C," becomes a lithe street rapper; Leonard's lost umbrella, which becomes his calling card, as it were, to higher social circles, is magically transformed into a Discman. And so on. Yet most of Smith's characters, inhabitants of a well-to-do New England college town, are every bit as rounded as Forster's own creations, and if their conversation about sex, money, and prestige seems, at first sight, so much cruder, we soon realize that their lives are encumbered by unspoken social protocols that are every bit as complex as the Edwardian codes that the Schlegel sisters knew so well.
As in Howards End, we become acquainted with two contrasting families. Art historian Howard Belsey, white English and conventionally left wing, is married to an African-American earth-mother, Kiki. Jaded and frustrated--he has been denied tenure year after year and his book on Rembrandt seems a perpetual work-in-progress--Howard has already come close to destroying his marriage as the result of an affair. With the arrival on campus of an old antagonist, the lofty, Trinidad-born conservative Monty Kipps (a bluff mixture, if you will, of V.S. Naipaul and Thomas Sowell), Howard, Kiki, and their teenage children are beguiled and repelled by an entirely alien value system.
Smith's extraordinarily sharp eye catches all the racial nuances as Kiki and her offspring interact with the aristocratic Kippses and the poor, ill-educated Haitians who serve as the town's hewers of wood and drawers of water. Just as, decades ago, the Jamaican Claude McKay portrayed the tensions that exist between black Americans and people of Caribbean descent, so Smith peers beneath the rhetoric of ethnic unity.
Class looms as an equally important factor. Whether they like it or not, status and spending power have a habit of forcing their way into the most high-minded conversation. As Margaret Schlegel declares to her aunt in Howards End, "You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It's only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. . . . I'm tired of these rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves."
If On Beauty sometimes has the faintly claustrophobic aura of a typical academic novel, with its petty professional rivalries, dull faculty meetings, and the even duller sound of people trying to be clever at cocktail parties, Smith casts an astute eye over the different ways the British and Americans negotiate their social hierarchies. Of working-class stock himself, Howard is, in essence, an immigrant twice over. One of his sons, Levi--fascinated by hip-hop culture--strikes the pose of a hardened street hustler, much as members of an earlier generation passed for white. Smith is a much shrewder social critic than anyone of her age has a right to be.
The maturity of her insights is quite startling. If only she could have been persuaded to narrow her sights. Just as White Teeth juggles a dizzying parade of ill-assorted characters, so On Beauty succumbs to the temptation to paint on an excessively broad canvas. After the first hundred intoxicating pages, the momentum slows, subsidiary figures stroll in and out of vision, and the luxuriant prose proves insufficient compensation for the leisurely pacing. Smith recovers her balance in the final third of the novel (the disintegration of the Belseys' marriage is astutely handled) but there is still no disguising the longueurs.
And ultimately, Monty and Howard make too schematic a pairing. It really is hard to summon up much sympathy for the latter's midlife crisis. An empty vessel spouting political pieties and art-school jargon, he is too weak and self-absorbed a figure to carry the burden Smith has placed on him. As for the overbearing, painfully self-assured Monty, enemy of affirmative action and champion of old-fashioned scholarship, he never quite comes into focus. Although he has the makings of a fascinating, larger-than-life figure here, he remains one of those people whose voices, loud and vibrant, you overhear at the edge of a party. The final revelation about his private life seems overly neat and moralistic, too.
The good news is that Smith is too much of a free spirit to make Monty the villain of the piece. In fact, of all the characters, he gets to deliver the most memorable political observations in the book. When Kiki, in a rare moment of intimate conversation with him, indulges in a left-wing rant about the "self-hatred" that is supposed to be the hallmark of black conservatives, Kipps has a ready answer:
Kiki, if there's one thing I understand about you liberals, it's how much you like to be told a fairytale. You complain about creation myths--but you have a dozen of your own. Liberals never believe that conservatives are motivated by moral convictions as profoundly held as those you liberals profess yourselves to hold. You choose to believe that conservatives are motivated by a deep self-hatred, by some form of . . . psychological flaw. But, my dear, that's the most comforting fairytale of them all!
Ask yourself how often you encounter such sentiments in a contemporary novel, and you begin to realize how rare is Smith's gift for empathy. Besides, while On Beauty (which takes its title from an essay by Elaine Scarry) may have its flaws, it is easy to forget that Howards End itself can be too much of a good thing at times: all those lush Arcadian rhapsodies can grate on modern ears, as does Forster's unashamedly patronizing depiction of the hapless Leonard.
It is worth bearing in mind, too, that Forster was roughly Smith's age when he published the book. Another decade-and-a-half elapsed before the appearance of his true masterpiece,
A Passage To India. And after that came nothing, in terms of novels at least, until the posthumous Maurice. Smith, still embarking on her journey, has more than enough time on her side.
Clive Davis writes for the Times of London.