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.

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.

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.

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.

Qué gran descubrimiento ha sido Zadie Smith.

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.

If I could strangle a book I’d strangle this book.

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.

Overall my impression is that Zadie Smith is a nice person, but putting her book in my hands is a bit like putting two boxers of completely different weight categories into the same ring. She came at me quick with dancing feet and rapid blows that I took coolly, after four hundred and forty pages she punched herself out and collapsed exhausted against the ropes. But she seemed really nice.

I saw that On Beauty is meant to be an homage to Howard's End, naturally I labour under the mild disadvantage of never having read that novel - but I did see a TV adaptation, scowling slightly I tried to work out the correspondences and drew up a mental diagram - Carl Thomas = Leonard Bast  except he lives with his Mum rather than a fallen woman  I think Forster is a bit too modern and racy for Smith and she dials down those aspects of him , therefore the Belseys must be the Schlegels (except with parents still alive because Forster is maybe not Victorian enough for Smith) and so the Kipps are the Wilcoxes with post colonial exploitation in the place of old fashioned colonial exploitation. Smith carries over several of Forster's set pieces, still overall my impression even from a TV adaptation is that Smith and Forster are not in the same league excuse the sporting metaphors - they can only get worse, they are probably several divisions apart.

Still my feeling is that On Beauty's debt to Howard's End is small, reading I was tempted to see it as a rewriting of The Tempest - which was referenced twice directly in the text - the two academics, stiff legged dogs snarling at each other on Caliban's island, both still bleeding and raw from their fight over Milan - and the ending hints at retirement and the burning of the books, but more seriously armed by having read Changing my Mind I feel that what this book is, is a sitcom. She starts with the basis of the odd couple - husband and wife, father and son, master and servant and constructs an entire odd family and then dumps an equally odd family at the other end of the same road, woa-hoo, sit back and watch the sparks fly and crazy stuff happen, except, snore, snore, nothing much does happen, I think it would be a step to far to say that it has a plot though the borrowings from Howards' end give it some structure in the same way that a blanket draped over the backs of a pair of chairs for a child might represent a house or a cave, or something. What she has instead of plot are characters, lots of characters, many of them are like Athena, they step fully formed from Zadie Smith's head and seem fleshed out and detailed enough to be the main character of another novel, but in this one they will feature just for a few pages.

I generally don't give up on novels, in any case this one is nice, it has lots of characters, but it just lacks, for me, life, reading it was watching a comedy that was relentlessly unfunny, or a news broadcast without any news, at one point I had an odd itching sensation to see what was on TV instead: there was Dog rescuers, The A-team in which Mr T seemed to have constructed a gun boat out of cheese graters (it sinks, but only after the bad guys have been punched and thrown out of helicopters), and the local news - with a special feature on shopping trolleys, the sweet surrealism of daily life. But I had read Changing My Mind and found myself playing Zadie Smith Bingo, and my God, everything there in those essays you can find here with the difference that in the essays I felt that she loved writing and was filled with passion and joy that she shared with the reader while this was more like a fish dying on a river bank, and not a species of fish that one could look forward particularly to eating either.

In my Zadie Smith bingo I got that she does not write write drafts just the one version - which accounts for the abrupt transformation in Mrs Kipps between her first appearance and her second in which she behaves like Mrs Wilcox which added for me the most noticeable humour as Mrs Kipps and Mrs Belsey struggle to communicate using social norms that are a hundred years apart. The scaffolding, or super dense writing a perfect example on page 17 in which Zadie Smith force-feeds us Kiki Belsey's ancestors - this is very kind of Smith because the enslavement of black people in the USA was historically so rare and extraordinary that the reader really must be told that her great-great grandmother was a slave - none of these ancestors counts for anything in the following story, even that she is the owner of the family house turns out to be an irrelevant detail which just leaves an odd puzzle at the end of the book  she moves out of her own house leaving her husband in possession of it.

My overall impression is that Zadie Smith is a Victorian novelist, specifically the love child of early Charles Dickens and mid career George Eliot, but with an awareness of the injustices of race. Her writing on race here was not as interesting as I had anticipated from Changing My Mind, instead for me the lurking presence of the Haitians was a kind of internal rebuke against the sitcom light heartedness of the conscious novel. That the main characters are black, with just the occasional token white person, which somehow came over as twee rather than radical - as though the pitch to the publisher was 'hey, this is going to be a campus novel, but with a twist', forty or fifty years ago it would have been fresh and provocative, but now seems to me to be barely shrug worthy - it is still a sitcom with a university campus setting, the skin colour adds the slightest edge to the fact that they rely on Haitian cleaners, taxi drivers and similar menial labourers but since the main characters are mostly pretty good at ignoring the intersection of race and socio-economic precariousness with it's background of US policy in the Caribbean. And I am not sure that Smith knew quite what to do with all these Haitians in her novel either, just as with all her other characters I have the feeling they are there because she likes to dream up characters.

We are made aware of beauty all the way through, mostly through the physical appearance of characters, on the whole the men were more beautiful while the women were more critically appraised and even when presented to the reader as attractive we are reminded that their beauty is transitory I did feel this showed some anxiety on the part of the author as though she could not see any woman older than thirty as beautiful, this sits alongside some considerations of certain Rembrandt paintings. To me his paintings are beautiful but mostly not of beautiful people, I sense though that my personal impression overpowers the use that Smith was making of Rembrandt in her story - or maybe not. A hundred years ago I think this could have been a contender, to me reading this book today knowing that it was written not that long ago it feels like just so much old hat.

This novel is Zadie Smith's homage to 'Howards End' by E.M. Forster as it plot loosely parallels Forster's masterpiece, dealing with the issues of class, appearance and, in Smith's narrative, black people's identity.

The story focuses on two very dissimilar families. The Besley family consists of Howard, a liberal university professor, his African-American wife Kiki and their children Jerome, Zora and Levi. The Kipps family is lead by conservative Trinidadian professor Monty, his wife Carlene and their children Victoria and Michael.

Smith cleverly interwines their lives, portraying the clash not only of their ideologies but also of their personal affairs. The conflict between Howard and Monty has being developed for several years, as their different approaches towards art makes they stand in totally opposite positions. During the story, the members of their families become more and more connected, creating bonds that the patriarchs don't agree with: Jerome works as an intern for Monty, having an affair with his daughter Victoria; Kikki and Carlene become friends, not taking into account their different backgrounds and beliefs; Monty's family moves and he starts working in the same university as Howard does, becoming a clearly opposition to what-used-to-be Howard's influential leadership.

As the novel takes place in an imagined upper-class white context, the author places significant issues regarding being black in the development of the novel. For instance, Kikki feels isolated as the black wife of a white professor, saying that '(her) whole life is white. (She doesn't) see any black folk unless they be cleaning.'  Meanwhile, her son Levi resorts to the city to find people he can identified with, changing his way of speaking, copying the street style he feels as the real black talk.

As you can see, this story is complex, intense, intelligent, puzzling, and more! Zadie Smith has created a masterpiece, becoming one of the most promising writers of her generation. Her power of observation fills the novel with a more deep understanding of topics that concerns the citizents of our contemporary world, without disregarding the pleasure you can find in a well-written story.

Now I know nothing about E M Forster, sadly, I haven't read any of his books yet. I obviously did not read Howard's end, the book On Beauty is based on, is inspired by. Yet, I can tell you that most of this book, perhaps even all of this book, is about seduction. All sorts of seduction - sexual, intellectual, the pull of a different identity, the allure of the 'almosts'. And so it's also about all the various characters rejecting, resisting, accepting, reluctantly pursuing, enthusiastically falling prey for these seductions.

Another relevant theme that sometimes just lurks in the background and sometimes just ambushes you full-force, is music. There's a very comical, emotional, confusing concert featuring Mozart's requiem, there's revolutionary hip-hop and spoken word, there's rap, there's Haitian music, there's extremely distressing funeral music and a horribly embarassing, very funny scence featuring a glee club.

There are extremes - political extremes, ethical extremes, academic extremes, racial extremes. You are pulled forward in every direction until you can't help but firmly stay rooted to your spot and scream "Oh my God, leave me alone" in agony.

Underneath all of this, Rembrandt and his paintings, and visual arts in general, follow us like vengeful spirits. They cast their ever-watchful eye upon us, the readers, as we stumble through the text and try to decide which character's take on art we like best. And just when we think we know, there's that inescapable question: what does any of this even mean?

This is a hideous, reactionary novel which plumps out to a facsimile of realist academic satire a farce of the malicious and dishonest variety in order to bring to life the defamatory caricature of the stodgy liberal Smith's political enemies: Marxists (in academe, yes, ripe for ribbing, but also in Caribbean politics, where the stakes are life and death and Smith takes the side of the ruthless slaughterers). The novel sets out to ponder Value and values -- aesthetic, moral, but real estate is not far below this surface-- and its lightweight replication of life around Cambridge, Mass is finally subsumed by a lengthy counterattack on all challenges to white supremacy. The book's aggressive "homage" gimmick matches its politics, as it is an act of imaginative gentrification - the reclaiming by elites of once exclusive cultural real estate that has been allowed to be vandalized and settled by undeserving populists and insurgent proles. Beauty is revealed as creation and essence of Empire after all, and it must be rescued from the philistines and rabble, vindicated and restored to the keeping of elites, whose superiority must be recognized finally by all the rebels, who in reverent epiphanies must lay down their arms. The novel concludes with an astonishing glorification of whiteness and European superiority staged as open mouthed awe in the face of a Rembrandt, and its miraculous depiction of the glowing white flesh of his mistress model, which requires no justification and trumps all analysis.

The most disgusting element of the book however is the gratuitous barrage of slurs of Jean Betrand Aristide and his wife Mildred Aristide (the latter Smith inexplicably vilifies with a racist attack). "ARISTIDE, CORRUPTION AND GREED" Smith has her faceless band of downtrodden Haitians rapping at their Boston club.

The novel's plot closely follows that of Howard's End. The house called Howard's End in that novel is in Smith's book replaced by a Haitian painting of Erzulie, which passes from the wealthy wife of the reactionary Caribbean (black) literary critic to the (black American) wife of his rival the (white) English former working class Marxist literary critic Howard (whose "End" is delivered as he is unmasked as hypocrite, philistine and fraud even as his challenge to Imperial Civilization and its Tradition is vilified and rejected).

(Howard is really more of a DeManian poststructuralist and has written a book "Against Beauty".)

This passing of the central symbolic object figuring the nation and its traditions - and Value - parallels the anciently genteel English Mrs Wilcox leaving her house, Howard's End, to bohemian half-German Margaret Schlegel, whom she has befriended and whom she subtly seems to choose to become her parvenu financier husband's second wife. Margaret then bequeaths Howard's End to the illegitimate son of her sister Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast, the clerk, - this is intended as a prophecy of some kind of Fabian future where the working class in partnership with the socialist bourgeois bohemians will inherit Britain.

In _On Beauty_, Kiki the hospital administrator wife of Marxist fraud Howard (who, in a reversal of the Forster model, brings Howard a house that she inherited from a grandmother who was the mistress of a rich white man), having inherited Erzuli, gives the priceless painting of the Haitian goddess to the Haiti Support Group, that is, to the merciless, murderous comprador clients of US empire who overthrew Aristide and the whole democratic government in 2004 and re-established the endless imperial reign of terror against the Haitian people. This recolonization is repeated in the narrative as Haitians appear only when the bourgeois Americans/Brits glimpse them, in symbolic squalor, or in the shadowy faceless voiceless form of a maid whose silhouette and mocked orange weave flits on the periphery of Smith's narcissistic bourgeois gaze, and who comes into focus only to embody a simpleminded, cowardly superstitiousness offered as emblem of her national subjectivity. _On Beauty_ puts Haitians back in their place as Smith's Harvard-affiliated, imperial clerk consciousness sees it, in both the telling and the told of her story.

So _On Beauty_ is in every way a book celebrating the restoration of the Holy Alliance against the revolutionary people of the planet. It tells triumphantly of the END of communism as embodied in an uppity working class white Brit who becomes a philandering selfish pedant refusing his paternalist class duty to civilize, overthrown and swept away by the welcome restoration of Eurosupremacism and white supremacism in scholarship and culture (which Smith concocts a black authority to validate and sanctify) and, simultaneously and interconnectedly, the restoration of US imperial despotism, yet again, over the people of Haiti. Smith invites her bourgeois liberal readers to cheer and breathe with relief at this chastisement of the renegades and the riff raff -- antiimperialists in US academia and in Haitian politics equally -- who are caricatured, mocked, defamed, shamed, and defeated (in a tasteless combination of cutesy coincidence plot and venemous TomWolfian characterisation) with a startling, un-Forster-like spite.