This is the second novel of Zadie Smith's I've read. Smith is a pretty amazing and refreshing talent, but this one didn't hit me with quite the impact that White Teeth did. In fact, this one feels more like a first novel than that one did. One of the things I really marvelled at in White Teeth is the amazing dialog, no small feat considering she had several characters with all types of ethnic, gender, and age backgrounds. The dialog in On Beauty is stilted feeling. Perhaps this is due to the fact that most of the speakers are from academia. Still, few, if any, professors I know speak like they write: stuffy with a verbosity that borders on logghoria.
On Beauty concerns the trials and travails of two diametrically opposed families: The Belseys, an interracial couple with three kids who are the embodiment of liberalism and godlessness, and the Kipps from Trinidad with two 'perfect' children who espouse an extremely conservative, Christian, and anti-affirmative action viewpoint. The families become intertwined through the Christian conversion of Jerome, eldest son of the liberal clan, and his subsequent short lived affair with the daughter, Victoria, of the conservative counterparts. The action centers around Wellington, a fictional Ivy League school near Boston. There is a great deal of talk regarding beauty, the inherent value of art, racial identity, and gender politics, but the core of On Beauty to me is the idea of identity in general. All people, Smith seems to be pointing out, have a public self and a private self. Expectations are based on the public self but every person is different than what the world perceives. Thus we have the 'thug' who is an accomplished poet and budding archivist, the privileged multi-racial child who yearns for black identity, the bastion of conservative thought who is not above adultery, and the reserved virginal girl who is actually a voracious seducer of men.
While this book didn't measure up to the aforementioned debut, it was still an enjoyable story. I look forward to reading just about anything Smith publishes in the future.
3 comments:
Good to know which to start with: White Teeth.
Any Graham Greene on your list?
This book was a huge disappointment for me--it just completely annoyed me, especially after the brilliance of "White Teeth." Her second novel is not great, either. Get with the program, Zadie Smith!
I'm glad I read it many months after White Teeth. Had I read it immediately after, I think I would have liked it less than I did. I responded to the themes of identity, which I enjoyed very much, but the stilted dialogue put me way off. I didn't find a character to identify with or root for, with the exception of Carl, and that is usually a problem for me as well.
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