At age 21, Zadie Smith wrote her first national bestseller, "White Teeth." Her second novel, "The Autograph Man," debuted in 2002 with much less acclaim than her first. Now her latest novel, "On Beauty," is climbing to the top of the bestsellers list. Smith's appearance at Olsson's Bookstore in Penn Quarter drew over 200 people. In this powerful and truthful look at race and class in America, Smith confronts these struggles from an honest perspective: her own.
The Belseys seem like an average, wealthy family who live in Wellington, a fictional university town outside of Boston. Howard Belsey, a left-wing Rembrandt scholar who actually hates Rembrandt, teaches at Wellington University. The setting is meant to have a Harvard-like feel: a small, wealthy liberal arts school with immense fame and prestige. What appears to be beautiful to Smith is quite often the opposite - ugly, messy and devastating - as Smith elucidates secrets behind the lives of esteemed universities that you won't read about in the Princeton Review.
Howard and his wife, Kiki (a 250-pound black woman), have three children: Levi, 16, an adolescent trying to retain his gangster persona in his family's upper-class life of academia; Zora, 19, a smart, tenacious student at Wellington who desperately wants to be loved by anyone - but especially Carl, a young black man who, for more reasons than his lack of education, is from a different world than her; and Jerome, a pained 20-year-old recovering from a short-lived romance with the woman who took his virginity at her family's place in London.
The London family is called the Kipps: Monty, Carlene and Victoria, the source of more than Jerome's broken heart. Monty is Howard's right-wing archrival, and also a scholar of Rembrandt studies. While the two collide when Monty gets a teaching position at Wellington, their wives become close friends, sharing secrets that only those close to these academic scholars know.
But behind this life of wealth and prestige, the Belseys harbor a deep secret. After 30 years of marriage, Howard had an affair with his colleague, Claire, a thin white woman who is, in many ways, Kiki's opposite. We learn of the affair in the book jacket, but we don't learn why until well into the 400-plus pages novel. There is another woman who catches Howard's eye, and she delivers some unbelievable surprises. Smith's writing is beautifully descriptive, capturing in every word the emotion the reader feels in sync with the character.
The Belseys and the Kipps have secrets buried in secrets, and as Smith plots them against each other, the beauty that once belonged to both of them becomes as hidden as their secrets once were.
"On Beauty" tries to deal with so many issues that it treats some in depth - family struggles, race issues - but glosses over others that are central to the novel. We never really learn why Howard has an affair, other than that his once-thinner wife is now not thin. But the only reason that Smith seems to offer is that all middle-aged men want to do this, so the fact that Howard does it is just natural. And what about Kiki? She deals with her pain in silence and goes on as a relatively normal matriarch, meanwhile struggling to somehow allow her 30-year marriage to survive.
The structure and theme of "On Beauty" is based loosely, though intentionally, on E.M. Forster's novel "Howard's End." His is a story of class difference, and Smith adds to it race, sex, infidelity and politics. Smith herself only spent a year in the United States as a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, but seems to have a wealth of knowledge for what life is like for an "average" family there.
In a recent interview with the alternative New York magazine, The Village Voice, Smith said she likes messiness in literature, which is clear in her unrestrained characters and often confusing, scattered plot. She loves "uneven writers," and tries to be one. "When I read novels, their failures are part of what I love about them," she said. "I'm always interested in the way writers fail to give you what you want, even the greatest writers"
