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Summary
Summary
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.
Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?
Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
Author Notes
Zadie Smith is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. As of 2012, she has published four novels, White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), and NW (2012), all of which have received critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors and Smith won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006. Her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazines TIME 100 Best English-language. Smith joined NYU's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor in 2010.
Smith attended Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-A hilarious comedy of manners in the tradition of Austen, Wharton, and Forster, to whom the author pays homage. She tackles class, race, and gender with acerbic wit and a wise eye for the complexities of modern life, in a 21st-century update of Howard's End. Beauty opens as hapless art historian Howard Belsey, a transplanted Englishman married to an African-American woman, returns to London to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of his academic rival, Monty Kipps. Jerome has fallen in love not just with Victoria, but with the entire family, whose Trinidadian, right-wing roots are a sharp contrast to the freewheeling liberalism of his own family. In the meantime, Belsey's other children, social activist Zora and Levi, who speaks only street slang and fancies himself from the 'hood, are each seeking the commitments and identities that will define their own lives. What results is a vivid portrait of marriage, family, the conflict between the political and the personal, and people's eternal affinity for self-deception. Teens will enjoy this romp through the labyrinth of relationships that help a family mature and find its beautiful moments.-Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal Review
Englishman Howard Belsey, a disgruntled Rembrandt scholar, lives in New England with his faded-activist wife and their three disparate children. Large issues come into play when one son falls for the daughter of a rabid right-winger. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century-style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys-Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American-and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass mat?riel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke-that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt-allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect-," but one that finds new substance here. Agent, Georgia Garett at A.P. Watt. (Sept. 13) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Smith's first novel, White Teeth0 (2000), won prizes and comparisons to Dickens and E. M. Forster. In her current novel, she even uses a couple of plot devices from Howard's End0 to brilliant effect. The Belsey family is multicultural as well as multinational. Howard is English, teaching art history at liberal Wellington College near Boston. His wife, Kiki, is from Florida, and as practical as her husband is intellectual. Although they love each other dearly, Howard's waning career and wandering eye have caused a strain. Their children follow their own paths: Jerome is a Christian; Zora is a socially concerned intellectual; and Levi is trying to be a black man of the streets. When Jerome falls in love with the daughter of Howard's archrival, Monty Kipps, the two families are thrown together in a personal and cultural battle. Although the romance sours, Howard and Monty's rivalry kicks up a notch, while Kiki and Mrs. Kipps develop an unlikely bond. Intermingled with the analysis of family and marriage are commentaries on affirmative action, liberal versus conservative, and prejudices in many forms. This is a boisterous, funny, poignant, and erudite novel that should firmly establish Smith as a literary force of nature. --Elizabeth Dickie Copyright 2005 Booklist
Guardian Review
Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers. Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip- hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives . . . White Teeth had a similarly heterogenous cast, but whereas in that novel Smith kept it together by keeping it light, with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded to throughout, is EM Forster. Forster's style, which looks simultaneously backward to the epigrammatic polish of Jane Austen and forward to the looser, more discursive amplitude we favour today, resonates strongly in the leisured cadences and playful figuration of the many beautiful descriptions and gently ironic authorial interjections that frame and connect the bright pieces of Smith's mosaic. You can hear it in everything from the stately scene-setting passages (particularly where rooms or houses are being evoked) to the most incidental moments, for example where the lovelorn elder Belsey boy joins his mother and her middle-aged friends at an outdoor festival: "Jerome, in all his gloomy Jeromeity, had joined them. The ill-pitched greetings that compassionate age sings to mysterious youth rang out; hair was almost tousled then wisely not . . ." More specifically, the plot of Forster's Howards End , ingeniously re-engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty . The unruly Belseys, like Forster's Schlegels, become embroiled with another family whose conventional household seems the stolid opposite of their own. In both cases the wives form a surprising friendship that leads to a valuable legacy being bequeathed by one woman to the other. And in both cases the family of the deceased woman conceals the legacy from her surviving friend. Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra- conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment, exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt . To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches. With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope for all the familiar farcical posturings so dear to the heart of academe. But while Smith does indeed deliver a superbly wicked example of that genre, this is only a small part of her achievement. Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression (from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner. But that isn't quite it either. The word "liminality", which a student of Howard's has to look up at one point (she would have found that it has to do with thresholds and boundaries), perhaps best expresses the driving idea of the novel and the source of its most powerful passages. These occur some way along, after the plot has been laid and the book begins coasting on its own momentum. They consist of a series of encounters in which the discrete worlds incarnated in these highly diverse characters start colliding and breaking each other open. At its most basic, the illumination that results is simply that of the surprise perspective - Levi Belsey applying his hip-hop worldview to a casual thought about Richard Branson: "Levi liked the way the mythical British guy who owned the brand was like a graffiti artist, tagging the world . . ." But in its more sustained form this collision principle becomes a way of taking apart and investigating elemental human configurations: parent and child, teacher and student (some of the most sensitive writing I've read on what actually goes on in this particular relationship), black and white, employer and employee. A degree of psychological vio lence is always implicit in such mutual broachings: Kiki Belsey's gravitation toward Carlene Kipps is a betrayal of her own husband; minor, but forceful enough to set off a cascade of reappraisals of both Howard and herself in her own mind. Sometimes the impact sets off a whole ricocheting chain of further encounters. Howard Belsey, usually armoured with a sneer (or a snore) against anything overtly "sublime" in art, becomes unexpectedly overwhelmed when a choir breaks into Mozart's Ave Verum at Carlene Kipps's funeral in London. He reels out of the church, the shock of mortality reverberating in his head, and finds himself wandering toward his childhood home in Cricklewood, where his father, whom he hasn't seen for years, still lives. Here, as the conciliatory impulse gives way to ancient antagonisms, a still more devastating confrontation takes place, and Howard careens off again, first to a pub, then to Carlene's wake where, drunk and dazed, he allows himself to be seduced in an upstairs room by . . . well, by about the last person on earth he should be allowing himself to be seduced by. A further pleasure of these charged encounters is the extraordinary vividness with which they have been imagined. Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action, giving even the most mundane moments - Levi riding a bus into Boston, Howard setting up a projector - a dense, pulsing life. There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip- hop moves to the gleeful horror of his kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper- intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir Monty, who's fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of a punch. But with so much done so extremely well, it seems ungrateful to dwell on imperfections. Numerous virtues more than make up for them: characters such as Claire Malcolm, an east coast poet/intellectual portrayed with a stunningly accurate feeling for the type. Or Carl, a sharp, touching study of a ghetto teenager making good, done with all the volatile political and sexual currents set in motion by such a progress. Or Howard Belsey himself, who starts out like an escapee from a Malcolm Bradbury novel but whose limitless capacity for folly keeps deepening and strangely sweetening his character. Above all, just the sheer novelistic intelligence - expansive, witty and magnanimous - that irradiates the whole enterprise. James Lasdun's The Horned Man is published by Vintage. To order On Beauty for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-Lasdun.1 Orbiting in this capacity around the Belseys are the Kippses, presided over by Sir Monty Kipps, an orotund West Indian intellectual who delights in provoking liberals with his ultra- conservative views on homosexuality, affirmative action and so on. Sir Monty has written a popular appreciation of Rembrandt which Howard Belsey, himself an art historian, though of a more highbrow bent, has denounced for its retrogressive stance. Unfortunately his attack was marred by a factual error which Sir Monty has wasted no time in exploiting to maximum humiliating effect, and vague dislike on Howard's part has turned to boiling resentment, exacerbated by the fact that he has been unable to complete his own book, Against Rembrandt . To this self-inflicted injury the opening chapters add two choice insults: first Howard's elder son falls in love with Sir Monty's daughter Vee, and then Sir Monty is offered a visiting celebrity appointment at Wellington, the very college at which Howard himself teaches. There are flaws, of course (and not just the portentous title). The beginning feels awkward: remnants of an older style full of grabby italics and wisecracking dialogue sit uncomfortably alongside the richer, more complex tone that takes over. Fussily choreographed bits of physical action (such as Howard showing off hip- hop moves to the gleeful horror of his kids) give some of the early family scenes a sitcom feeling - not so much visualised as televisualised. The plot clunks a bit at first, too: a laboriously contrived trip to London premised on some unconvincing business about a lost address book; the convenient coincidence of Sir Monty being offered a job at Howard's college. More seriously, some of the characters appear blurry or under-drawn - especially Kiki Belsey, who seems intended to embody a kind of feelingful alternative to Howard's hyper- intellectuality but never quite comes out from behind the enormous bosom with which her creator has a little too symbolically endowed her. Also Sir Monty, who's fun, but too cartoonish for his inevitable exposure as a hypocrite to pack much of a punch. - James Lasdun.
Kirkus Review
An academic comedy of multicultural manners finds Smith recapturing the sparkle of White Teeth (2000). Following her sophomore slump with The Autograph Man (2002), the British author returns to biting, frequently hilarious form with a novel that concerns two professors who are intellectual enemies but whose families become intertwined. Radical theorist Howard Belsey, a British art historian married to the African-American Kiki, detests the cultural conservatism of Monty Kipps, a Caribbean scholar based in England. Kipps apparently has the best of their rivalry, having raised his profile with a well-received book on Rembrandt that stands in stark contrast to Belsey's attempts to complete a counter-argument manuscript. Through a series of unlikely coincidences, Belsey's son becomes engaged to Kipps's irresistibly beautiful daughter, Kipps accepts an invitation to become guest lecturer at the Massachusetts college where Belsey is struggling for tenure and the wives of the two discover that they are soul mates. As Smith details the generation-spanning interactions of various minorities within a predominantly white, liberal community, she finds shades of meaning in shades of skin tone, probing the prickly issues of affirmative action, race relations and cultural imperialism while skewering the political correctness that masks emotional honesty. As the author acknowledges in an afterword, her story's structure pays homage to E.M. Forster's Howards End, recasting the epistolary beginning of that book as a series of e-mails, while incorporating all sorts of contemporary cultural allusions to hip-hop, academic theory and the political climate in the wake of 9/11. Though much of the plot concerns the hypocrisies and occasional buffoonery of the professors, along with the romantic entanglements and social crises of their offspring, the heart and soul of the novel is Kiki Belsey, who must decide whether to continue to nurture a husband who doesn't deserve her. While some characters receive scant development, the personality that shines through the narrative most strongly is that of Smith. In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
"Howard Belsey is an Englishman abroad, an academic teaching in Wellington, a college town in New England. Married young, thirty years later he is struggling to revive his love for his African American wife Kiki. Meanwhile, his three teenage children - Jerome, Zora and Levi - are each seeking the passions, ideals and commitments that will guide them through their own lives." "After Howard has a disastrous affair with a colleague, his sensitive older son, Jerome, escapes to England for the holidays. In London he defies everything the Belseys represent when he goes to work for Trinidadian right-wing academic and pundit, Monty Kipps. Taken in by the Kipps family for the summer, Jerome falls for Monty's beautiful, capricious daughter, Victoria." "But this short-lived romance has long-lasting consequences, drawing these very different families into each other's lives. As Kiki develops a friendship with Mrs. Kipps, and Howard and Monty do battle on different sides of the culture war, hot-headed Zora brings a handsome young man from the Boston streets into their midst whom she is determined to draw into the fold of the black middle class - but at what price?"--BOOK JACKET.
Table of Contents
1 Kipps and belsey | p. 1 |
2 The anatomy lesson | p. 127 |
3 On beauty and being wrong | p. 273 |
Author's note | p. 445 |