Published in 2005, this is another novel by Zadie Smith. Having appreciated The Fraud and Swing Time, I'm now a Smith fan, so that's one reason for picking it up. Its background -- academia -- also resonates with Stoner (John Williams), and Babel (Rebecca F. Kuang). And I was reminded of it when it came in at No. 94 on THAT LIST...

My audio-version was brilliantly narrated by Peter Francis James. It's a very conversational novel, and he really made those exchanges sing. I still have his voice in my head as I write.

TL;DR version: I Loved This Book...

Zadie Smith is so readable (or, in this case, so listenable-to), and yet she presents such profound ideas, such intricate conundrums. So you gallop through, because the story is engrossing, and then you think about it later, and all those layers start to reveal themselves. Very, very clever.

The story has a ton of subplots and interesting characters. But the heart of it is the contrast (and conflict) between two families. Most of the action takes place on a fictional college campus called Wellington, near Boston in the United States.

Howard Belsey is a not particularly successful academic, still striving for tenure, and struggling with his latest book on Rembrandt. His subject is art history, but he's a man of many -isms, so intent on deconstructing and deflating his subject matter that he loses (until right at the end) any sense of the beauty of what he is examining. He's white; he's British by origin; and he still (like many from those parts) hasn't shaken off his lower-class origins, and the chip on his shoulder. He's in his 50s when we meet him; he's a convinced liberal; and he has just imperilled his marriage by conducting a brief affair with a woman who's a poet, an academic, and a friend of the Belsey family...


Rembrandt: Self-portrait. Several of Rembrandt's works function in the novel as focal points for discussions of how we react to art

Kiki is Howard's wife. Black, Floridian, and emphatically not an academic (she's a hospital administrator), she feels out on a limb in Wellington's predominantly white environment. Of all the characters in the book, Kiki is infinitely the most likeable. She's warm, feisty, and compassionate; she's large and colourful, and plain-speaking. How she landed herself with Howard we're not quite sure...

The Belseys have three children. Jerome is the one I could make least of. He's a student at another institution; he's a Christian (unlike the rest of his family). He kicks the book off for us, but he remains stuck on the edges somehow. Zora is a student at Wellington. Primarily motivated by her desire to star in the ongoing Zora show, she comes across initially as not very likeable. (James Lasdun: "[She is] a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven..." It's not only US student culture, though...) Zora grows on us, however. Underneath her relentless pursuit of her own ends, she's struggling with insecurity, and ultimately she does have compassion and decency. We're sorry when she keeps getting disappointed. Levi, the third Belsey kid, is a great character. All the siblings are a bit conflicted over their biracial identity, but it's Levi's confusion that takes the most entertaining form. Determined to confound his middle-class background, he adopts a faux Brooklyn accent, claims to the "brothers" that he lives in Roxbury, and does his best to adopt the patter and ways of those he considers authentic "street".

In the other court, we have the Kippses, of British-Caribbean descent. Sir Montague is the black conservative counterpart to Howard's white liberal persona. The knight's views on art, politics, and pretty much everything else are diametrically opposed to Howard's, but he doesn't seem to have much grasp of the idea of beauty for its own sake either. When Sir Monty comes to Wellington as a visiting scholar, then, clashes are guaranteed. But they're actually very alike, these two: Selfish, cloth-eared, and unappreciative of their family's needs. At the end of the day, they're both old guys, with all the faults of old guys (OK, in fairness, not all old guys...).

Carlene, Sir Monty's wife, is a bit of a cipher. Rather withdrawn (partly because she's ill, and partly because she seems to relish her role as quiet Christian wife), she nevertheless takes to Kiki, and shows an endearingly uninhibited appreciation of the beautiful (as represented by the paintings she gathers around her -- and by Kiki). Of course, this is Smith, who builds into her books more layers than a matrioshka doll, so later we come to suspect that the provenance of some of these paintings might be a bit dodgy. But at least Carlene is uncomplicated in expressing what she likes...

We don't hear that much of son Michael, but daughter Victoria starts to attend Wellington when the family moves across the Atlantic. A strikingly beautiful young woman, she is still exploring the overwhelming power of her sexual attractiveness.


Den Haag, 2018. Rembrandt was born in Leiden, just down the road...

Constantly present as a background is the world of academia, which is beautifully and wittily observed. We have the classic rivalries and gossip among the faculty (as well as some key ideological differences). We have Claire Malcolm, a bit of a self-sabotage merchant, but a genuninely empathetic and enthusiastic teacher. We have Dean French, the guy who never gets to the point, and never wants to make a decision (surely he was a character in Stoner too...?). We have a cross-section of students (often cruel in their honesty and rivalry, but also touching in their insecurity). We have the assistants who actually do a lot of the donkey-work (these lecturers are even less technically competent than I was). In all, it's a brilliant depiction.

Also bubbling along, never far from the surface, is the issue of race, as Smith offers, in passing, a catalogue of what it means to be black in America. Levi, as a young black guy, constantly finds himself encountering suspicion; yet he also starts to understand what Haitians newly arrived in the US might be up against. Kiki rages that everywhere she goes, she's alone in a sea of white: "I barely know any black folk anymore, Howie. My whole life is white. I don’t see any black folk unless they be cleaning under my feet in the fucking cafe in your fucking college. Or pushing a fucking hospital bed through a corridor." Yet Levi complains she underpays her black Haitian domestic help...

With this complex framework in place, we move from set piece to set piece, each gloriously and robustly drawn. Kiki visiting Carlene ("modern" wife and "old-fashioned" wife); Claire taking her class to an open-mic poetry session; Levi attempting to instigate some "direct action" at the store where he works, and encountering all kinds of opposition, including from the woman who WANTS to work Christmas Day because she's so short of cash; Levi again, having his "street" act seen right through by the guy who used to work in a shoe factory like the one that must have produced Levi's USD 120 sneakers... That faculty meeting (jeez, I have been to SO many of those...); Howard visiting his old, politically incorrect dad; the various phases of the Bildungsroman of Carl, a gifted rapper who is trying -- unlike Levi -- to get himself OUT of the street, and doing very well at this endeavour, but ends up nauseated by the hypocrisy of the university environment. And so on. All realistic, resonant, never laboured, constantly beguiling.

This is a very dense book. Lots happening. Lots of characters. Lots of themes. Anyone else, and I'd be saying, "Wahhh, too much going on..." But Smith aces it. Knocks it out of the court. It holds together beautifully.


There was a black community not far from Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam

***

I won't go into the denouement. On Beauty is not a thriller, but even so, there's a certain amount of suspense involved.

Once you've enjoyed the story, and let the themes settle round you a bit, you start thinking of the layers underneath.

On Beauty pays homage to E.M. Forster's Howards End. Because you don't generally hear the Acknowledgements when you listen to an audio-book, I didn't know that until afterwards. Even if I had known, it's such a long time since I read (or watched) Howards End (1992/3...), that I probably wouldn't have spotted the themes anyway. But some rummaging in my diary and online reminds me that, there too, we had two interlinked but diverging families, and a desperate desire for connection ("only connect..."), and a young man keen to better himself, and a bequest that is not initially honoured by the family of the deceased. (There's much more detail on these parallels here.)


The Syndics of the Cloth Guild

***

Another of Smith's "intertexts" is Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. This is very clear from the performative, script-like way in which Victoria Kipps approaches sex with Howard Belsey (yes..., sigh...). But as I have STILL not read Lolita, despite good intentions, I can't comment further.

***

I was intrigued to find the "pantoum" cropping up. That's the verse form that's modelled on the Malay pantun. The pantoum we are offered is attributed to Claire, and it's entitled On Beauty. It's actually a poem that Smith's partner, Nick Laird, has already had published. Which is a bit weird, but hey...

***

And so we come to the title...

Smith holds up before us a variety of different forms of beauty -- as represented in people, classical music, rap music, Haitian music, pantoums, Rembrandt, Haitian art -- and shows us the different ways in which different people respond. As Andy Mousley points out, the responses matter: "On Beauty is, amongst other things, about a renewed sense of the importance as well as precarity of aesthetic judgement." Smith contrasts, for example, Howard's clinical, post-modern detachment from beauty with Kiki's initial enthusiasm for a painting hanging in the Kipps house (a depiction, by Haitian painter Hector Hyppolite, of Maitresse Erzulie, a Haitian loa with multi-faceted symbolic associations); then she contrasts that exuberant response with Kiki's self-conscious retreat into Howardism ("we're so binary..."), and then again with Carlene's simple, appreciative sentence: "I like her parrots."


Maitresse Erzulie

A seminal influence, says Smith, was On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry (1998). There's a bit of a crib sheet here. Key ideas (all reflected in Smith's novel) are that beauty brings copies of itself into being (we see beauty, and want to paint it, photograph it, or write about it); beauty -- by inspiring the desire to protect it and share it, and by making us realize that we are not in fact the centre of the world -- has the power to promote justice; and beauty, ergo, is not superficial but vital.

And sure enough, the professors who are (in their different ways) contemptuous of art are also morally corrupt: "[Howard's] critique of Rembrandt follows a hopelessly clichéd liberal-left formula with textbook precision... Beneath [his] thin veneer of pompous poststructuralist, neo-Marxist rhetoric lies his personal resentment against the establishment"; Kipps, too, uses beauty "as a vehicle of his own political ideology", and is no more a supporter of art and beauty than Howard is. Neither is genuinely touched or moved by art or beauty; both use it for their own purposes. Contrasting with these instrumental approaches are student Katie's discovery of Rembrandt, and (right at the end, perhaps too late, and in a tragi-comic scene) Howard's discovery of the beauty of Kiki: "Deprived of the protective armour of academic jargon," says Itakura, "Howard somehow manages to achieve a direct, immediate encounter with the painting, which changes him deeply... His now better understanding of the beauty of the painting suggests that he has begun to appreciate the beauty, inner and outer, of his wife."


The Biblical Susanna, depicted as an ordinary woman, wearing ordinary slippers. This was the painting that so moved Katie, while Howard (and Victoria) remained purely in the realm of the cerebral


A Woman Bathing

***

Then there's Haiti... Haitian immigrants are everywhere in the novel, and various commentaries (here and here) explain some of the artistic references.

Haiti keeps resurfacing in my reading... There was Victoire in Babel, hailing from Haiti, and resenting the way her supervisors kept trying to wrest its spiritual secrets from her... There was a Martin Hewitt adventure, complete with the stereotypes of the day...

***

In all, then, this is a prime example of the kind of book I like best: A really great story, that really makes you think, and teaches you about stuff you were unaware of.