Character is plot, anyway, says the man behind Darconville's Cat. On Beauty does just fine with its characters. But, "A character for me is any linguistic location of a book toward which a great part of the rest of the text stands as a modifier" says the man behind The Tunnel. I'll grant her the characters, but the language through which those characters are constituted verges upon cliché. Too harsh I know ; the novel reads too easily, slickly. And I know ZS does better. There is nothing here ; to orchestra a novel's polyphony one needs to do more than place a bit of argot in the mouths of a few characters. This one here, despite its promising title, is a mere ordinary lit=fic novel.

I try to summarize this book for people, and I find that I really can't do it. The story, when you try to outline it, seems much too short to be stretched out across 443 pages. Here is my best attempt at summary:

The story takes place mostly at a fictional East Coast college in the US, although some of the story happens in London. There are two feuding families of academia, but the only pair that even slightly resembles Romeo and Juliet are the two mothers. The book is about race, poetry, art, Haiti, sex, marriage, college, poverty, wealth, politics, Rembrandt, Mozart's Lacrimosa, rap music, death, and a million other tiny things I've probably forgotten. It is funny and sad and beautiful and ugly and loud and quiet and vulgar and touching, and is full of lines like this: "...it is never really very cold in England. It is drizzly, and the wind will blow; hail happens, and there is a breed of Tuesday in January in which time creeps and no light comes and the air is full of water and nobody really loves anybody, but still a decent jumper and a waxen jacket lined with wool is sufficient for every weather England's got to give."

I should have just re-read Howard's End.

I requested this book from our public library because I have obtained a ticket to her Zadie Smith speak at our University in February 2016. I think it will be a lively evening!

Zadie Smith is a shrewd observer of the human condition. And she takes a good hard poke at the idea that knowledge and art can be somehow value-neutral, that we can ignore the purpose of the person who created a piece of art (I think that’s post-modernism?).

One of her main characters, Howard Belsey, is a college professor who teaches art history. But Howard is completely unnerved by expressions of firm belief and strong emotion. His lectures are virtually incomprehensible in their refusal to discuss the beauty of the works, the purpose of the artist, or response of the viewer. The students of the college describe the various college courses in terms of tomatoes—a history course becomes Tomatoes 1867-1967, for example. Howard’s student, Victoria, nails his reluctance to grant value to love, beauty, or truth when she describes his art history class to him:

But your class—your class is a cult classic. Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato…Because tomatoes are not there to be liked…Your tomatoes have nothing to do with love or truth. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people for totally selfish reasons of their own, have attached cultural—I should say nutritional--weight to.

The irony is that an art history professor is completely unable to recognize or appreciate the beauty in art or in his own life. He is disconnected from his family and out of touch with other college faculty. He has had an affair with a woman about whom he cares nothing (and she, if possible, cares even less about him) out of sheer thoughtlessness. Because he has espoused this value-free existence (absolutely no religion, no Christmas, etc.) he is seemingly unable to resist doing the wrong thing, frequently. (Mind you, the religious characters fare no better in Smith’s tale).
Howard’s part of the story is just that—only a part. Smith also gives us a window into his wife, Kiki’s, world as well as their children, Jerome, Zora and Levi. All of them have to find what they will and will not live with, what they will do with their lives. Kiki must decide whither her marriage will go, Zora whether she will follow in her father’s academic footsteps, Levi whether he identifies with the middle class or with Haitian immigrants. Of all of the family, Jerome seems to be the clearest of purpose, although things certainly don’t begin that way.

Smith writes gorgeously. Her insights into our interpersonal communication difficulties are right on the money. Because the Belsey family are mixed-race and middle-class, she is able to explore race and class issues effectively as well. An excellent novel and I am very much looking forward to hearing Ms. Smith speak in February.

Deliciously brutal take on how class, race and gender are actually dealt with in the society of academia. Excellent stuff if you're into that sort of thing. At any rate, Smith again makes good on her gift for making the reader feel tenderly towards her reliably flawed protagonists.

I think On Beauty is brilliant. I loved the extra layer of meaning that my reading of E.M. Forster's Howards End provided -- but I don't think it's necessary to do background reading to enjoy this novel. The characters are "messy," as Zadie Smith would say -- most of them make a lot of mistakes, but, for the most part, you love them, or sympathize with them for all of their deficiencies. It's a book with many layers, which is just the kind of fiction I love the most!

Zadie Smith has experience in many worlds, crosses many boundaries, and has interesting things to say from a variety of perspectives (including as both a fiction writer and as an academic). She's not only an extremely talented novelist, but she is super educated and smart, with interesting opinions on art, writing, and reading that can be appreciated by anyone. For example, her stance on the value of reading fiction in one sentence, which I really like: "When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good)." (Read "Love, Actually," published in the UK Guardian, Nov. 1, 2003, to understand the fullness of what that means.)

In On Beauty Smith tells an engaging story centered in a Harvard-like community, with lots of political, social, and academic battles that make you laugh and cringe at the same time. The dialogue is snappy and entertaining. We get the most concentrated view of Howard, a middle-aged, untenured professor (his stalled book-in-progress and unpopular art history lectures argue against Rembrandt's artistic genius), and his practical, down-to-earth, and wise wife and three young adult children. Howard gets himself deeper and deeper into trouble, putting his 30-year marriage on the line for extramarital nonsense, as his career continues to go nowhere. There are lots of controversy-filled themes packed in this novel: race, immigration, class, gender -- along with love, family, friendship, coming-of-age, and aging. Everyone is trying to figure out their place in the world and with each other.

One of the many memorable scenes is when Howard makes an unplanned visit to his father during an emergency trip to London. It has been four years since their last failed visit, and they both can't help -- despite their best intentions -- but clash. Howard and his father speak different languages. It pains Howard to confront his father's ignorance just as his father is shocked by Howard's incomprehensible views of art and puzzled by his interracial marriage and family. Smith skillfully captures the chasm between father and son, painful memories, and the impossibility of successful communication and a meaningful relationship.

Readers of Howards End won't have any trouble recognizing the parallels - but Smith goes way beyond the framework provided by Forster, to make this a book that addresses contemporary personal and social contradictions in an entirely fresh, creative, and relevant manner. I highly recommend this outstanding novel!

Zadie Smith has no understanding of the way Americans speak, which made this book impossible to finish. I kept pausing to marvel at her ridiculous attempts to write in "dialect," then I finally gave up.

When Zadie Smith is good, she’s a force to be reckoned with: a gifted satirist adept at dissecting societal intricacies, a wordsmith whose storytelling resonates with innovation and intertextual depth. When Zadie Smith is bad, she doesn’t just stumble, she nosedives: cheap humor, gratuitous jabs, and shallow characterization. Too much awareness of one's cleverness can be a pitfall, and Smith is not immune.

A homage to Howards End, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is a modern novel of manners, blending the playful and knowing storytelling reminiscent of classic literature like Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and of course, Forster, with the juicier dramatics of White Lotus and Kevin Kwan's work.

Cerebral, often obnoxiously so, On Beauty unfolds as a sprawling social satire primarily set in the fictional university town of Wellington, near Boston. The narrative centers on the Belsey family: Howard, a white British professor at Wellington and a scholar of Rembrandt; his wife Kiki, a Black American woman; and their children, Jerome, a rather introverted and 'innocent' young man, Zora, a student at Wellington who reveres her father, and Levi, the family's outlier who rejects academia in favor of immersing himself in what he perceives as a more 'authentic' Black American culture.

Contrasting the Belseys are the Kipps, a Black British family diametrically opposed to the liberal values cherished by Howard. The ‘head’ of the family Professor Monty Kipps is Howard’s nemesis. A devout Christian, Monty’s conservative beliefs and reactionary stance are appalling to Howard. Yet, due to a series of events, Howard's son, Jerome, not only interns in Monty's office but he ends up temporarily living at the Kipps residence in Kilburn. Jerome, a born-again Christian, is drawn to the Kipps, to how united they are, to the harmony of their household, ultimately falling in love not only with their familial dynamic but also with the daughter, Victoria.

Things do not pan out and Jerome returns to the US brokenhearted. Howard, in a manner not dissimilar to Tolstoy’s Oblonsky, has grown impatient with his wife’s response to his infidelity, wanting the marriage to return as it once was. But Kiki is still in the process of forgiving Howard for what he has led her to believe was but a momentary transgression. Like her youngest son Levi, Kiki has always felt somewhat disconnected from the Belsey family dynamic, not necessarily intimidated by their intellectualism but allowing Howard's vision to dictate their lifestyle.
She’s not intimidated by their intellectualism but she has allowed for Howard’s vision to dictate not only the decor of their house but their lifestyle as well.
Several months after Jerome’s never-fully realized romance, the Kipps relocate to Wellington where Monty becomes Howard's colleague. The two rarely come head to head and yet their ideological differences simmer beneath the surface, transforming the university into a battleground for their conflicting views. Their clash exacerbates existing divisions, particularly regarding issues like affirmative action, within the university community.
Surprisingly, despite the animosity between Monty and Howard, their wives begin to forge a tentative friendship. While they have very different views, they share a mutual understanding, as both have, whether they admit it or not, long been overlooked and undervalued in their roles as wives and mothers.
Further sources of drama are Carl, a Black poet who becomes a pawn in Zora and a professor's attempt to underscore the necessity of offering opportunities to individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, a disastrous wedding anniversary, a painting by Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite, a funeral, and a teacher-student liaison.

Despite its length, On Beauty is scarce in characterization and offers very few emotional beats. I found the interactions between Carlene and Kiki to be the most compelling, as they offered a respite from Smith's intellectual verbosity and sardonic asides. Unfortunately, their connection is short-lived, and the narrative predominantly focuses on Howard and Zora, two of the most unlikable and unsympathetic characters in the novel.
Howard, despite being the novel's central figure, is almost entirely made up of flaws: a hypocrite, both in his politics and his marriage, an appallingly distracted father figure, wholly absorbed by the realm of academia, and burdened by nor only an awareness but an overestimation of his own intellect. He is abhorrent. But, more unforgivingly, he is boring.
Zora, on the other hand, falls into the trope of the bratty, self-absorbed daughter, a characterization that feels clichéd and one-dimensional. Smith attempts to age up this archetype but ultimately Zora is just like so many other fictionalized teenage girls who are selfish, shallow and disrespectful towards their mother. Zora humiliates Kiki in front of virtual strangers, denies Kiki selfhood and agency, and not only takes her father’s side but blames Kiki for being cheated on…while Zora's internalized misogyny could have been addressed it isn't. What we get is a reductive portrayal of a fraught mother/daughter relationship (that only paints the daughter as being a bitch).

And sure, in Smith’s works, everyone is a fool, but compared to the teen girls and young women of her Swing Times, Zora and Victoria are painfully one note and in the case of the latter objectified, not only by the other characters (which is not a problem and would be a reality given that she is beautiful) but by the story itself. She’s portrayed as this precocious coquettish young woman who is defined solely by her physical beauty and the feelings she incites in the men around her (her father and brother seem to view her as a virginal too pure for this world girl, jerome and howard desire her) and the ‘threat’ she poses to the women around her (zora hates on her because she’s insecure and i guess hating on other women is easy and free).

The narrative reduces Victoria to a plot device, oversexualizing her and making her conform to the stereotype of the beautiful-on-the-outside-not-on-the-inside woman who toys with men. That whole sex scene with Howard was appallingly unfunny and little other gratuitous (“her hands either side of her buttocks pulling them apart. The tiny rosy knot in the centre presented Howard with a dilemma.”). Its nod to Lolita made the whole scene even more gimmicky.
Howard, the buffon, is hapless, and cannot possibly ‘resist’ Victoria…Smith...this is giving Seth MacFarlane type of humor. Puerile and sensationalistic.

Funnily enough, lately I have been criticizing a lot of American-authored books for their portrayl of countries outside of their own (be it britain or italy)...but Smith is here to prove me that no one is immune from this. Outside of the fictional setting of Wellington, Smith's portrayal of America is far from convincing, with characters like Levi and Carl being the most glaring examples. We are told that Levi is making an effort to adopt a Black American urban dialect so the way he speaks is intentionally on the nose...but Carl isn't, and yet, the way he talks is all over the place. With Levi, it was less the way he spoke but his characterization in general, especially when it came to his likes/dislikes, what he values and what he wants from life...it all came across as a Cambridge-educated woman's interpretation of a young American man. Smith's signature verbosity and cerebral references characterize Levi's sections, and Levi is someone who does not view the world through academia-tinted glasses...this discrepancy was jarring and frustrating as if Smith could not possibly stop herself from 'being' present. Levi had potential as a character, and his involvement with a Haitian group merited more page time. But Smith chooses to use him as a comedic relief of sorts, portraying him as a poser with little to no emotional intelligence.

Additionally, Smith's depiction of Kiki's body feels problematic, as her weight is overly emphasized as her defining characteristic. While there are moments where Smith manages to acknowledge society's fixation on Kiki's body, she ultimately perpetuates this focus, reducing so many of Kiki's scenes to her physical appearance. It was frustrating as she already established that Kiki is overweight early on, and yet, this has to be made into her main ‘characteristic’, which it shouldn’t, because someone’s weight is not a personality trait. I appreciated that through Kiki's arc Smith is able to explore how suffocating it is for Kiki to live up to the Strong Black Woman stereotype, showing us instead that however emotionally strong Kiki is she is also fragile and capable of feeling lonely and in need of someone (to listen to her, to see her). As I said before, Kiki and Carlene's moments together were truly my favorite in the novel. There was friction sure, but there was also a vulnerability there that is nowhere to be found in the rest of the book.

Smith's tendency to focus excessively on the abject body becomes predictable, as she disruptes otherwise poignant moments in the narrative. For example, a scene with the Belseys children has to mention: "He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth". We get it, bodies are gross, and so on. But the way Smith repeatedly overemphasizes the 'imperfect' and 'ugly' physical attributes of her characters, is often just childish.
Smith's reliance on simplistic descriptors, such as "womanish" hips this and "mannish" hands, feels lazy and reductive. I get it, Smith wrote this in the 2000s, but even so, I am pretty sure that Smith, even during that time, could have employed more subtle or original language to describe her characters' appearances.

Smith also misses no opportunity to "display" her knowledge, which, is unnecessary because, from the first few pages we know, we can sense even, just how clever she is. An example would be a scene where one of Howard's students is described as an "anorexic with that light downy hair on her cheeks"....Smith, come on now. This just comes across as Smith eagerly demonstrating her understanding of anorexia...but if feels contrived, especially when many individuals with anorexia do not exhibit this particular trait (especially "functional" anorexics). Smith has this wink-wink tendency to showcase her expertise in various subjects often comes across as out of place and self-indulgent.

These issues frustrated me all the more because Smith is undeniably a brilliant writer. While her satire can sometimes feel predictable and superficial, she can be genuinely witty and insightful, and I admire the way she can write with such clarity about human foibles and societal structures. And despite her tendency for intellectual ramblings, there is an immediacy to the scenario she creates. I appreciate her social commentary, which is both expressive and astute when delving into themes of class, race, gender, and education.

On Beauty had the potential of being a thematically rich satire, as through her characters' misadventures Smith explores marriage and fidelity, social pretence and the facade of propriety, human ego, white liberalism and privilege, intellectualism and faux intellectualism, and the insular world of academia. But time and again Smith falls back on using her characters as cheap punchlines or gets too wrapped up in her bombastic prose.
Also, considering the title, I was expecting more of a focus on beauty and aesthetics. However, Smith is easily distracted, dwelling instead on cringe-inducing comedy moments or indulging in prolix academia-adjacent tangents. It's a pity because there are isolated moments that resonate, presenting readers with an insightful commentary or observations. Yet, these instances are fleeting, blips, and overall, the narrative fails to maintain its coherence or impact.
The family drama is overshadowed by forgettable scenes that fail to contribute anything to the overall story, let alone add depth to the characters.

Despite my less than enthusiastic review for On Beauty, I would still recommend it, especially to readers who have a high tolerance for verbosity and banal humor. There are elements within the book that feel remarkably relevant, especially in its exploration of the politics and hierarchies within the academic world (already in the early 2000s we have faculty members and students bemoaning diversity and the decolonization of the curriculum).

Not a great read, but one that, for better or worse, engaged me as a reader.

Contrary to a lot of people's opinions, I loved this book! The first couple of chapters were unpredictable and refreshing, and the rest of the book was an amazing story about family life, marriage problems, racism, growing up, and beauty.
I loved every single character, and while especially one of them behaved irrationnally, it was entertaining and informative to read about his decisions and the ensuing repercussions.
"On Beauty" was one of those books that grabbed me from beginning till end, and while I've only read one other novel by Zadie Smith, this one has been my favourite so far. It was easy to read and yet a very universal book that I think everyone can benefit from reading - even though it does seem that some people don't really like this novel at all.

La belleza de las relaciones humanas. Y su asombrosa complejidad. Entre parejas, entre padres e hijos, profesores y alumnos, blancos y negros, negros del caribe y negros africanos, ateos y religiosos, conservadores y liberales, artistas e intelectuales. Una visión reflexiva de lo que nos une y nos separa. Zadie Smith sabe mirar el mundo desde distintas perspectivas y poner en boca de sus personajes argumentos inteligentes, incluso para defender una postura completamente distinta a la de ella misma. Los personajes de Zadie viven...como todos, se divierten, sufren y confrontan. Y son completamente creíbles, se trate de un erudito profesor universitario, un ama de casa feminista que (¿paradójicamente...?) lo dejó todo por un hombre, un poeta rapero o una insaciable "Lolita". La escritura lúcida y minuciosa de una autora que no decepciona.

my first book of 2024 being a 5 star?? we are so back

Out in the world there are people, apparently a good number of them, who are endlessly fascinated by the lives of professors, are titillated by garden variety marital affairs, gripped by petty academic disputes and want to spend their time reading books about people doing stuff.

I am not one of those people.