On Beauty

Without in any way meaning it as a sign of disrespect to Zadie Smith, when I picked up her latest tome, On Beauty, it was with a rather heavy heart. It's just that, for me, the days of being able to devote endless hours in one sitting to a novel are sadly, long gone. My once great passion for contemporary fiction is now reduced to a few snatched pages here and there, now and then, and so the prospect of a complex narrative with many characters and many themes was somewhat daunting.

I needn't have worried. I slipped comfortably and easily into the lives of the Belseys and the Kippses; I knew them, I understood them and I thought about them when I wasn't with them. For me, that's the litmus test of a tale I am going to savour, and savour. I did the unravelling of two families and, primarily, of their two male figureheads who, in their own minds, are polar opposites of each other and yet, in reality, are just different sides of the same coin; that coin being one of privilege, self absorption and lack of self awareness.

Howard Belsey is a fifty seven-year-old, white Englishman who has spent most of his adult life in the rarified atmosphere of east coast American academia and the past ten years at Wellington College in New England where tenure still eludes him. He presents himself as a liberal iconoclast with radical things to say about Rembrandt but, whilst Belsey talks a good and impressive game, he has singularly failed to deliver in terms of published works.

He has failed to deliver too, in terms of fidelity to his wife, Kiki, a generously proportioned Black American woman who ,we are often reminded, is 'no intellectual'. What we are quickly able to work out for ourselves, however, is that whilst Kiki might stand in her husband's intellectual shadow, her character and substance dwarfs the good professor's in every respect.

Three near-adult children complete the Belsey clan; twenty-year-old Jerome, a deep-thinking and sensitve soul, nineteen-year-old Zora, a firebrand with every confidence in her brain but little in her body and sixteen-year-old Levi who chooses to affect the persona and language of a 'proper black bro'.

When we meet them, the Belseys are limping along as a family unit, each carrying a personal hurt of some description but still with some hope of healing their wounds. With the introduction into the mix of the Kippses, those wounds are blown wide open.

Howard is hugely threatened by the arrival of fellow art historian, Sir Montague Kipps, at Wellington college. 'Monty' is everything Howard Belsey is not, a moralising Conservative Christian of Caribbean descent who abhors affirmative action and maintains his fellow 'coloured' man must sink or swim according to meritocratic principles. He is also a fêted, published author.

Inevitably, the two men clash but it is the series of detonations their coming together causes in their own lives and in the lives of those around them that creates the real interest.

In On Beauty, Zadie Smith has indeed produced a complex narrative with many characters and many themes. She explores issues of class,culture, race, personal and professional morality and, most notably for me, the nature of male hubris.

But, hey, better than all that, it's a ripping good read.