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On Beauty

zadie smith

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This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

445 pages, Paperback

First published June 4,2005
Literary awards
booker prize, orange prize, somerset maugham award, anisfield-wolf book award, bollinger everyman wodehouse prize, commonwealth writers prize, 
Places
london england, new england, 

This edition

Format
445 pages, Paperback
Published
August 29, 2006 by Penguin Books
ISBN
9780143037743
ASIN
0143037749
Language
English
Characters More characters

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zadie smith

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Rating(4 / 5.0, 99 votes)
5 stars
29(29%)
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99 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Lindle
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Why have I been put off by trying Zadie Smith in the past? Could it be the name of her books? With the names 'On Beauty', 'The Autograph Man', 'White Teeth' or even 'NW', could that have really been the reason why I hadn't read, much less really picked up anything by her? How superficial is that? I have a 'don't judge a book by it's cover' mentality merely because when one judges by the way it looks is ridiculous because I've found some completely ugly covers that have been great books and the opposite, but 'On Beauty'? With its simple cutesy curly cue type on front, the name that yells aesthetics (aesthetically speaking), it was one that was first picked up and not even flipped through, one that was put back onto the bookshelf without a second glance for quite some time. I picked this up out of curiosity, I picked it up because I wanted to go outside the box. This is one that I failed to even look at the excerpt or blurb to what it was about. I climbed onto it and rode on. This story is about the beauty of life and how beauty is completely relative in nature. This bi-racial, bi-cultural symbiosis between man and woman and their story of the world around them is well thought out, ingenious and realistic. Not only is it a story, plain and simple, set out forthwith without abstract meaning, it holds the key to what great story telling is all about: getting to the core of an issue and not hiding it behind a curtain. THIS IS IT, HERE I AM, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT.

The insecurities with our loved ones, our tendency to be doormats, raw emotion and lessons learned are all on display and this is what makes this a 5-star and not a 4-star.

Anyone can write a book with a story such as this, but understanding what you're writing and knowing HOW to portray what you're writing in a way that it truly makes someone snicker like 'yeah, I know how that is'...that's what does it for me.




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Tigerfang_17
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I found this to be such a readable novel, the kind where you sit down for an intended 15 minutes and end up engrossed for an hour or two.
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romzanalimohon
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Zadie Smith mi entusiasma e mi delude a fasi alterne: questo romanzo mi ha entusiasmato. A suo tempo me l'ero perso, perché credevo (il titolo mi ha fuorviato) fosse un saggio. Grazie alla segnalazione dell'amico Roberten73 l'ho recuperato e letto con gran piacere, perché è bello almeno quanto Denti bianchi, senza però quella sottile vena surreale e quella lieve sfumatura grottesca che portarono alla definizione, per la scrittura della Smith, di realismo isterico. No, qui abbiamo invece un romanzo tradizionale: per intenderci potrebbe essere un Franzen, ma con più umorismo. Abbiamo la famiglia Belsey, cinque protagonisti interessanti e efficaci, che vive nell'orbita di un prestigioso college del New England, sfondo che è magistralmente descritto con un'ironia cinica e affettuosa al tempo stesso. Intorno a loro altri personaggi azzeccati e mai banali. Succedono molte cose, le vicende si intrecciano e scorrono fluenti come rami di un torrente, e tutte girano intorno (con leggerezza, intelligenza, arguzia) alla questione principale, ossia l'università: il diritto all'istruzione superiore, il rapporto tra professori e studenti, i limiti del libero insegnamento, il rispetto delle minoranze e l'inclusività del corpo studenti, eccetera. Ma ci sono anche l'amore e la politica. Insomma un romanzo denso, scorrevole, brillante e coinvolgente.
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Agerno
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Zadie Smith's book On Beauty is about two families on opposing sides of the culture war: The atheist, liberal Belseys on one side and the ultra-religious, ultra-conservative Kipps' on the other. It's also about race and racial identity: black versus white and the influx of poor Haitian immigrants into Boston. It's about Howard Belsey's affair with an old friend of the family and his wife Kiki's attempts to deal with it. It's about Kiki's developing friendship with Carlene Kipps, the wife of her husband's sworn enemy.

All in all, it's not my thing, but it's a stunning example of something that's not my thing. I don't go for domestic drama - I find it too mundane - but I quite enjoyed this one. And that's really almost everything I have to say about it, my other comments being somewhat tangential.

I really liked the dialogue. It's real, it's energetic, it's got heart. It's so strong you can almost hear the characters' voices in your head. On the other hand, I didn't think the characterisation was particularly good. I didn't have a clear picture of any of the characters by the end, which is pretty pathetic.

A culture divide, perhaps? I think it probably was. I couldn't take them seriously because they used the word 'totally' too often. Here in Melbourne, Australia we (or at least, the people in my speech community) use 'totally' either in its original sense ('fully', 'completely') or as a joke, a parody of some American stereotype we don't really understand. Like "omg, you should, like, totally dye your hair orange! It would be like soooooo great." Dripping with sarcasm. In On Beauty they use it liberally in the slang sense, which is similar to my example above, except minus the sarcasm. They're serious about it, but I can't take it seriously. It really put me off.

Then there's the whole black/white thing. The extent of the racial divide shocked me. Again, here in Melbourne NO ONE CARES. One could argue it's because there are very few black people, and that a similar thing happens between whites and Asians instead, but it was just weird for me. In On Beauty, no one could just be "a person". They had to be "a white person", "a black person". Like their race was just as important a factor as their status as a human being. That really distracted me too.

It was mainly those cultural thingies that interested me about the book. It was funny, I guess, and sometimes depressing, but not at all the sort of thing I'd usually read and all in all rather disappointing considering its reputation.
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Leozin7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Loved this.

Many characters are wonderful creations, especially the women. Kiki, Carlene, Zora. Howard Belsey is a masterpiece of self-destruction. His nihilistic take on art; his relationship with his Dad (their scene together is heart-wrenching, one of those where you want to scream at one of the characters - but then it was very close to the bone for me). He's not a stereotypical philanderer. The reasons for his cheating on Kiki are complex. He does try to get out of the Victoria situation before it begins. Not hard enough. The depiction of the damage he wreaks by cheating on Kiki is sensitive and hugely intelligent. Anyone who is tempted to cheat on their life partner should read this.

Identity politics as a theme. Without exception, every manual / menial worker in the book is Haitian. This jars until you realise that that is precisely the point. OK. But it seems to extend to all aspects of identity. Howard Belsey's professor colleague speaks with an "infamous lesbian baritone"? While you never want to ascribe value judgements as necessarily being the author's, Smith's sensibilities are all over this book, in every aspect of the writing. I couldn't work out if this was Howard's voice, the narrator's or Smith's. I'm still confused about it, it jarred, but it's Smith so you tend to give her the benefit of the doubt.

Some bits didn't work. Such as the scene where Carl, Zora, Jerome and Victoria confront
each other at the student party ... I groaned at the cliché of Carl hanging his head in dejection and making his way slowly to the door. This is in the second half which somehow doesn't seem to have the masterful writing of the first. It doesn't have the sublime, beautifully crafted, self-contained wholeness of Forster's book; the theme of "only connect" is clearly there from the beginning in the differing ways that Jerome, Kiki and Howard relate to the Kipps's, but I felt that it was somehow left to hang half-way through in favour of other themes; for example the power of art to move us and speak truth, belying Howard and his cynical dismissal of anything 'beautiful'. This is unfair though; I know Smith should not be judged on how closely she steers to Howards End. In the end this is nit-picking (God I hate that in newspaper reviews - the compulsory quibbles in an otherwise glowing review to show how discerning the reviewer is). The book is clever, beautifully written and humanistic, a paean to togetherness and love.
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missind33
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Sassy, smart and street-wise is what this novel is; what Zadie Smith is. With a literary nod to a favourite novel of mine, Howards End - which is anything but sassy and street-wise - this is a novel that only Zadie Smith could pull off. As in White Teeth and NW, it is teeming with snappy conversations, larger-than-life characters, literary references and unlikely plot developments (partly grâce à Forster); in short On Beauty is full of life and soul.

The prose crackles and sparkles, and once again we witness Zadie Smith’s trademark ear for different dialects and sociolects, rap and literature. And while many of her sentences are eloquent and the topics serious, they are also full of mirth. It is perhaps what I appreciate the most: her wit. Because it is invariably coupled with heart and smarts.

Here Howard, middle-aged intellectual Brit transplanted to the United States courtesy of his voluptuous, African-American, non-intellectual (and utterly wonderful) wife, Kiki, is having a conversation with a curator at the college where he teaches (who speaks the first line):

’Ag’inst Rembrandt’, the second man said. He had a high-pitched Southern voice that struck Howard as a comic assault for which he had been completely unprepared. ‘That was the title your assistant mailed us – I’m just tryna figger what you meant by ‘ag’inst’ – obviously my organization are part-sponsors of this whole event, so –‘

‘Your organization –‘

‘The RAS – Rembrandt Appreciate – and I’m sure I’m not an innellekchewl, at least, as a fella like you might think of one…’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’re not,’ murmured Howard. He found that his accent caused a delayed reaction in certain Americans. It was sometimes the next day before they realized how rude he had been to them.

Forster dealt in social classes: the cultured intellectual Schlegells, the moneyed business people - the Wilcoxes, the working class man - Leonard Bast, who were all trying to bridge the gap between their classes; between literature and life – to ‘only connect’. In On Beauty Zadie Smith takes us to a college town in New England, and so her groups are Americans, Brits, whites, African-Americans, intellectuals and non-intellectuals, students and rappers, teenagers and their parents – all trying to find their place in the world, to connect or, as in Howard’s case, work through a mid-life crisis. And as in White Teeth, she has created characters that jump off the page and really exist. But On Beauty shines much brighter than WT and NW, in my opinion.

The novel was further from Howards End than I had expected but turned out to be a fantastic book in its own right, allusion to favourite novel or not. When I read her acknowledgements at the end, I nearly broke down (in gratitude? wonder? renewed and double appreciation of Forster and Zadie Smith?) This is what she writes:

It should be obvious from the first line that this is a novel inspired by a love of E. M. Forster, to whom all my fiction is indebted, one way or the other. This time I wanted to repay the debt with hommage.
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