Stunningly beautiful. Breathtakingly real. Brilliant, and honestly one of my top 10 favorite novels forever more.

I so get the hype around Zadie Smith now.

My first Zadie Smith and it left me speechless. A compelling character driven story of two mainly Black families in the UK and the United States. Smith has a superb hand on human characters, and this was the start of my love and respect of all her work. 8 out of 12.

3.5 stars

On Beauty by Zadie Smith is 442 pages. A very, very slow 442 pages in which you need to be fully engaged and present while reading. This is not a book you can breeze through, as the book would mention of certain characters: it is intellectual. There is no doubt that Smith is a talented writer, I just struggled a bit in establishing a reading pace with this one.

On Beauty follows the Belsey family: an interracial couple, Howard and Kiki, married thirty years living in an upper middle class town with their three children, Jerome, Zora and Levi.

- Howard is an art history professor at a local liberal arts college who is hard to like; he always has an opinion (its most always negative) and he’s always right (or so he thinks)
- Kiki used to be a beautiful spitfire but has gained a significant amount of weight; still a spitfire but that magnetic confidence doesn’t exude from her like it used to (I blame Howard)
- Jerome is a young man trying to find himself in religion and grapples with adulthood and his relationship with his family; he is the rational one of the bunch
- Zora is Howard 2.0 with the spunk of Kiki; she yearns to be accepted but her approach in getting what she yearns for is more alienating than endearing
- Levi is sixteen and going through an identity crisis; he is passionate and loyal and trying to find something worth fighting for (his family doesn’t understand him – as any teenager would say)

What was once a well-oiled machine of a marriage becomes broken overnight. Howard and Kiki dealing with who they once were and who they are now, and the kids trying to come into their own while their parents unravel makes for an interesting household. Cue in a slew of other characters that will bring out the best and worst of the Belsey clan.

The story addresses culture norms, social class, political differences, stereotypes, personal vendettas and the like. It was portrayed in such a way that you did not feel the story was trying to lead you to believe one point of view over another; it was more about perspective. It’s an authentic portrayal of the inner workings of a family and the façade they provide the outside world versus what its really like when the front door is closed.

It had a very funny start and I was hopeful of the tone it set, but then I got lost in the weeds when the writing became too granular on the subject of art and literature. There would be pages upon pages of description and I rather prefer dialogue: bring back Kiki and her likeable charm. Kiki, Jerome and Levi were the only characters I liked; much of the others were highly irritating.

It’s a thought-provoking read and made for some good conversation at book club. It’s not a summer vibe read, but may be a good read cozied up in a blanket with fuzzy socks near a fireplace with a cup of hot-chocolate (now who is being too descriptive?!).

To read my reviews visit: www.saturdaynitereader.com

sometimes, it feels like your entire emotional, mental, and spiritual well-being relies on liking one single book.

welcome to that experience for me.

i love the idea of zadie smith, but historically i have not liked her books. my first experience with her wasn't what anyone would recommend. i picked up grand union, her largely disliked short story collection, which i read for the great reason of finding it for $1 at a used bookstore. it turns out there was a reason for that great deal.

my second attempt did not begin auspiciously: i committed an unforgivable reader crime, which is when you go on vacation and bring exclusively books you've been putting off reading in an attempt to finally get through them. i call this "reverse desert island books." i did manage to get through white teeth via this brute force, but i didn't enjoy it.

zadie smith writes entire books with a raised eyebrow, something i appreciated much more this time, when she seems to have a fondness for her unlikable messy characters, than in white teeth, when she seems to be acting as a punishing god whose dislike for the people of her novel is rivaled only by the exhausted reader's.

this did feel fairly plodding and abrupt, and i didn't out and out love it at any point, but i did truly feel impressed at times. and that, to me, is enough for a good time.

bottom line: i get the appeal! thank god.

I would probably give this book three and a half stars, which is not an option here. I thought it was well-written and had many interesting, memorable scenes, but the book did not really feel like a cohesive whole. The story follows an interracial family in an academic setting. The father is a white art history professor at a private liberal arts college in a fictional suburb of Boston; his wife is a black southern woman and they have three kids.
The title "On Beauty" comes from a poem, which is quoted at one point during the book. The book did comment on different types and perceptions of beauty as well as different kinds of intelligence and intellectual styles. These themes are conveyed through the novel's many characters. For example, there is the wife, Kiki Belsey, a large black woman with beautiful skin who radiates with a goddess-like presence, who notes that people expect this like her as a black woman of her size. She is not in the academic world, but is perhaps the most emotionally intelligent character. Her husband Howard is an average-looking white middle-aged man, who struggles with finishing and publishing his academic scholarship and whose style tends to dispute common understandings about the art world. (His main thesis is that Rembrant wasn't really anything special, he was just painting to fulfill the requests of the clients who commissioned him.) Another professor, Claire Malcom, is a petite, thin white woman who wears no make-up and might seem not to care about her appearance, though it is revealed that she has been ordering salads almost her entire life, practices yoga in order to stay young and flexible, and pays careful attention to her bikini line. Claire is a poet and is somewhat looked down upon within her department for not being a "real" academic. Howard and Kiki's daughter Zora tries too hard in both respects. She spends considerable time getting ready in the morning and pledges at the beginning of the semester to swim everyday and lose weight. She also works inredibly hard in her classes (she is a sophomore at the fictional college, Wellington), but does not seem to have any real opinions of her own. What she lacks in natural beauty or talent, she makes up for with hard work and persistence.
Similar analysis can be made for almost every character, some we barely meet at all. For instance, in the course of three pages we are introduced to a college freshman who was the academic star in her high school who is terrified to open her mouth in Howard's class for fear of saying something stupid. As quickly as she is introduced, she is gone, never to be mentioned again. This breadth of characters provides these various human idiosyncrasies, but in some ways damages the story as a whole, never letting us get to know one character or storyline in depth.

i read this too long ago to write a proper review of it, but this is a little heads-up if anyone wants to check out a "summer reruns" list i made over here:

https://www.rifflebooks.com/list/237495

i do so love making lists.

just as my idealized fantasies about academic life were getting a little out of control, the characters in this book come along to make me realize academics can be just as gross as lawyers at times. i also realize i have never read a book about a professor-family before.

in the middle of the book, i told someone that i didn't like any of the characters (except for levi, who is amazing), yet i liked the book - which speaks well for the author. by the end, i liked the characters more. the black characters i think intentionally represent a really varied spectrum of black "types", though i think some of them were less well-developed than i wish they had been. i felt this was sometimes about kiki, and also about chantelle. but she did such a great job with levi -- the one most likely to be caricatured - that i forgive it. i haven't read white teeth, but several people i know like this book better. it's the kind of book that probably merits a second read because of all of its layers, a welcome change from the semi-crap i have been reading.

another reviewer said that zadie smith can't quite get the hang of american english dialogue. i did notice this a little bit. in particular, all characters would very often say "et cetera" in casual conversation. who says that? and her urban-black-boston characters would say that things were "scene" [instead of cool:], which - again - i have never heard.

i loved, loved white teeth. i did not like on beauty. i'm afraid zadie smith wasn't able to capture american-speak very well. kiki has southern roots and, at times, she supposedly "went florida" in her speech and mannerism, but this was something smith simply stated rather than demonstrated. i could excuse levi's not entirey successful attempts at urban dialogue given his suburban/academic family background, but not carl's. maybe i'm extra critical b/c, in a past life, i spent some time in the spoken word scene, but carl was a shell of an idea rather than an authentic, believable character. whatisname's assistant, the other southerner, really showed some of smith's weakness in writing regional/cultural dialects. one "accented" word in a character's sentence - e.g. "pahpoint" - w/o keen attention to how other more common words should be spoken does not make for very convincing dialogue.

i was so distracted by the characters' inauthentic language that i didn't have the patience/interest to hone in on the themes about beauty...which seemed a bit shallow anyhow. ok, the fat character is sympathetic and fun and smart and good-looking despite her rolls...the thin beautiful character is too often taken merely at face value and people don't make much of an effort to get to know her beyond that...but the reader can't get to know her beyond that b/c smith also isn't interested in her other than for her looks.

the good stuff: the father felt genuine and gave an honest look at academic/intellectual pursuits when stagnant. his thoughts about his family and marriage also felt real and were interesting to me, especially b/c...well b/c i'm not a man and he seemed to offer a real "man's" (albeit an older man's) point of view. i thought his musings on his relationship w/ kiki were more thoroughly drawn out than kiki's, interesting since smith is herself a woman. kudos to her for being able to represent the husband so well. (though i wonder if a male reader would disagree about smith's success with that.)

There was a certain amount of hype surrounding this book, and on the front cover, it is said to be a funny and clever book. Well, I'll tell you here and now, don't believe a single word of any of it. Get out while you still can! This book is a prime example of one I'd swiftly throw out of the window without looking back, but unfortunately for me, I borrowed this from my Mother, so today she may gladly have it back.

Since this is my first Zadie Smith book, I must say, we haven't gotten off to a good start. The book closely resembles "Howard's End" another book that didn't thrill me, but I wasn't looking for resemblances, I was looking for something fresh and new, and maybe some light entertainment.

The plot is bland. Nothing remotely exciting happens, and the characters are far too skeletal for my tastes, and the only emotions her characters managed to within me, is annoyance. The diologue is irritating, and it made me wonder why Smith makes out that Americans actually talk like that.

Where was the beauty theme? It was paper thin, and you need to dig deep to find even a snippet of it. There wasn't any obvious beauty within this plot, but Smith felt the need to inform the reader every couple of chapters which woman Howard was dipping his bread into.

I am aware this book won a couple of prizes, plus, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2005. The book releases that year must have been dire, for this to have even been considered for the prize. I am so relieved to to be writing this, as it means I can finally move on, and quickly forget that I've ever read this book.

After the huge success and critical acclaim for Zadie Smith's 'White Teeth' (deservedly so) and the intriguing strangeness of 'Autograph Man' - we had 'On Beauty' which at the time didn't garner quite the same level of critical acclaim, indeed some reviewers found the novel significantly lacking in comparison to Smiths' preceding novels.

Whilst 'On Beauty' may well not be Smith at her finest (see 'White Teeth' and 'Swing Time') it is certainly a very strong novel.

'On Beauty' - as the title suggests looks at issues of appearance, race, beauty, identity and class, and does so with great dexterity and accomplishment. It is a great story well told and Smith examines important themes in an intelligent but realistic, accessible and pragmatic way. This is all about the big socio-political themes and how they impact and in some cases, determine our little lives.

n  

They are the damned
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face
(Excerpted from "On Beauty")

n

In this novel of intellectualism, where street lingo is interspersed through dialogue, there is performance poetry and academic poetry; liberal academics angrily debate conservative academics about the right to one's belief and the need for inclusivity; Haitian workers form a resistance to low wages; two families of intellectuals, the Belsey and Kipps families, remain social enemies and at the helm of these families are the wives, Kiki and Carlene, who become friends. The story seems rooted in the women: Kiki, Carlene, Vee, Zora, and Claire. The children from both marriages become lovers and foes,the issue of race and class is viewed in each character's experience, and at every juncture of the story, there is a need for community, a search for identity, a fight against exclusivity. And did I forget to mention, there is art (Rembrandt).

In case you haven't already envisioned it, this novel is complex, compactly packed with various issues and innuendo, yet it exists freely, lightly, and explores everyday lives even while embodying an existential message. Admittedly, I went back and forth with my rating: higher, then lower, and finally higher. I found that as I turned the pages of this book into the middle of the night, I thought long and hard after I closed it. For me, this is a sign of a book that has enriched my reading experience, enriched my mindset, enriched my life. Sure, I had a love-hate relationship with the dialogue, which permeates the story: some parts were effective, some parts appeared sluggish, some scenes-in-dialogue were a bit unconvincing, some descriptions, like seeing "your mum rang" painted in graffiti in a East Coast 'hood' seemed unbelievable ("mum" spelled that way and "rang" as the word choice? Too English, the phrase ). Yet I marveled at the authentic portrayal of black intellectuals (a portrayal you rarely see in novels), enjoyed the juxtaposition of religious and political views, appreciated the elucidation of interracial marital struggles (especially once Howard Belsey's father, Harold, is introduced).

I turned the pages and realized the beauty of this novel: the narrative is vociferous enough to enthrall even the most distracted reader, the prose is so opulent that it gives you perspective during exposition that could sometimes be one-page-paragraphs, the dialogue is both facetious and deliberate. I found myself drawn to Carl, the street poet who is given a chance to sit in (or 'audit') a poetry class, even though he is not a college student. He is later given a job at the college, a hip hop music archivist, until his world crashes when he is placed in the midst of the hypocrisy of academics, the hypocrisy of privilege and class and gender and race. Carl's story makes lucid much of what the novel portrays, shows how love's intentions may be well-meaning but selfish and how bureaucracy could trump good will.