On Beauty

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.

White Teeth

I'm not sure how I missed White Teeth when it was published in 2000. It seems to have garnered almost universal praise from critics and readers alike, and was turned into an acclaimed mini-series in Great Britain. White Teeth was the debut novel from Zadie Smith.

White Teeth has many characters, all of whom interact on a variety of levels, but at the heart of it all are Archie and Samad, friends who met during World War II who have continued to be friends. The novel jumps back and forth in time, focusing first on Archie, then on Samad, on Archie's daughter Irie, and then on Samad's twin sons Magid and Millat. The characters' lives are intertwined, allowing us to meet Archie's wife Clara and Samad's wife Alsana, both an entire generation younger than their husbands and with different views on the world. Archie and Samad are both, in their own ways, stuck in the post-war promise of England, and have trouble adapting to modern times and modern problems. Indeed, much of the plot revolves around the constant push and pull of the various traditionalists as they rub up against more modern times.

Their progeny further complicate things. Irie is an independent thinker with a strong pull towards a past that her mother would rather forget. Magid and Millat take different paths (due to an astonishing action by Samad) with Millat embracing the lifestyle of a young English hood and Millat sent off to the east to become a more traditional Bangladeshi Muslim. Needless to say, things don't really go as planned or anticipated for either Archie or Samad.

What makes this novel so memorable are the epic scope, the memorable characterizations, and the facility Smith shows with language and dialog from so many different types of characters. She seems to have mastered the nuances of both genders and of a number of nationalities. Thoroughly engaging and hard to put down, White Teeth is a fantastic novel.