On Beauty (2006)
Who wrote it?
Zadie Smith (1975- ; active 2000- ), born Willesden, London, UK to a Jamaican mother and an English father. She was born Sadie Smith and changed her name to Zadie aged 14. When younger, she was actively interested in tap dancing and considered pursuing a career in musical theatre. Music is another thread in her life - she made money as a jazz singer while studying at Cambridge University, and among her siblings are rapper & stand-up Doc Brown and rapper Luc Skyz.
While studying English at Cambridge, she began focusing on writing and had several short stories published in an anthology of student writing called The Mays Anthology. Off the back of these stories, she was offered a contract for her first novel, which created a buzz in the publishing world several years before its publication. On publication, White Teeth (2000) was a critical and massive commercial success, and won several major awards as well as being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. It was followed by 2002’s The Autograph Man (also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize) and then On Beauty, which marked Smith’s first Booker Prize shortlisting, as well as its victory in the Women’s Prize for Fiction at the third time of asking.
She has subsequently published two further novels, 2012’s excellent NW, set around her home district of Willesden in North-West London (also my home postcode for much of the last decade, so I’m maybe slightly biased!) and 2016’s Swing Time which focused on her youthful interest in dancing. She has also published several short story collections, most recently Grand Union (2019), written a play - The Wife of Willesden (2021), and a collection of essays written during the Covid-19 pandemic - Intimations (2020).
What's it about?
On Beauty, unlike many of Smith’s other novels, is set predominantly in the US - though still has a healthy focus on Britain (or at least Britain as represented by - once again - North-West London). It focuses on the intertwined lives of two families - the Belseys and the Kipps. Both have university professors at the helm, in the shape of Howard Belsey, a white English Rembrandt scholar (living with his African-American wife Kiki and three children in a fictional affluent university town near Boston, MA), and his nemesis Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian initially living in London with his wife Carlene and two children.
As Monty and his family inevitably end up moving to work and live at the same university town as the Belseys, various threads in the novel explore the relationships between the two families, largely focused on the enmity between its two male protagonists which hinge on Howard’s (seemingly well-intentioned but occasionally naive) liberalism being contrasted with Monty’s (boldly expressed but highly provocative) conservatism. Alongside this central conflict there are also many intersecting relationship breakdowns and infidelities, out of which very few characters emerge with a great amount of dignity.
Perhaps the closest thing to a wholesome relationship in the novel is that which develops between Kiki and Carlene, in which despite their massive differences in political terms they bond over a shared genuine appreciation of art, and over a particular painting in particular which proves to be the catalyst for many of the novel’s tensions and themes to converge.
What I liked
As with everything I’ve read by Zadie, On Beauty is a pleasure to read. It’s entertaining, funny, page-turning and packed with larger-than-life characters.
There are some particular standout characters here for me - Monty Kipps is memorably awful, all of the Belsey children are intriguing and uniquely drawn (with Levi in particular developing from what seems early-on like a cliche into having an integral and complex role in the later stages), and the street poet / rapper Carl is similarly disruptive (in a good way) in the later stages. Kiki is also joyful, a classic Zadie Smith character.
Aspects of Smith’s writing seem to come to life when the action transitions to her native NW London. Predictably, I loved these sections, particularly the memorable description of the Belseys’ journey west from highly affluent Hampstead to the slightly more rough-around-the-edges (at the time at least!) Willesden.
That trip also gives Howard (elsewhere a slightly painful character to spend so much time with) his best moment, in an encounter with his estranged father (and subsequent solo pub trip) which is all painfully well done.
For all the tendency to describe Smith’s writing as overblown, there are actually some nicely understated moments in here - including the conclusion which hinges on a glance, requiring few words with which to demonstrate its power.
As I touched on above, there are some clever little twists towards the end, alongside some of the more predictable developments. Carl’s takedown of the way he’s been used by Zora is brutal, and the revelation of how Levi’s naive but well-intention engagement with Haitian immigrants intersects with the core families’ internal dramas is quite powerful.
What I didn’t like
I haven’t read all of Zadie’s work but I’ve enjoyed those I have a fair bit more than this one. Partly it’s down to the fact that both White Teeth and NW are more consistently set in familiar territory, which both helps my selfish level of interest and also seems to be where she really thrives, but I don’t think that’s the whole story…
More of an issue I think was the setting in the world of academia. Admittedly some of the debates being had at Wellington College help illuminate the novel’s broader themes, but occasionally they do stray into the territory of feeling like the chronicles of a bunch of irritating academics and their petty disputes. I guess that’s partly the point, but it’s not always fun.
The setting conspires to make the whole novel feel much more middle class than Smith’s other efforts. Some of the richness of what her writing usually offers feels lost as a result. For much of the novel, the less affluent characters are reduced to bit parts, interesting only insofar as they’re used to illuminate the flaws or foibles of the primary actors. When we drop in on reality, as with Levi’s visits to his immigrant friends or Howard’s encounter with his dad, the writing seems to step up a level. I wanted more of this sort of stuff!
The writing around Howard and Monty’s affairs - predictably enough aging men punching well above their weight with women often a third of their age (or thereabouts) is actually kind of icky in places. While it’s clearly intended to be damning of their characters, it actually just felt like it was repeating many of the tropes found in novels written by male authors in the 80s and 90s, without really providing suitably savage criticism of the old letches and their behaviour. Yes, they’re made to seem a bit pathetic, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
Food & drink pairings
Indulgent university banquets (though preferably without Glee Club accompaniment….)
Copious amounts of wine
Fun facts
The novel is described by Smith an an “homage” to E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, with various themes and tropes re-appropriated in the novel.
Smith gives herself a brief cameo in the novel as a “feckless novelist” who departs a tedious meeting early. Wellington, the novel’s university setting, is based in large part on Harvard, where Smith wrote much of the novel while on a visiting professorship. Her younger brother, Doc Brown, also appears in the novel in a named role as MC of the open mic nights that feature heavily.
There was apparently some serious debate among the year’s judges, with the decision by no means unanimous. With Ali Smith and Waters’ books both also serious runners, it was apparently Mantel’s Beyond Black that came closest to denying Smith her first major award.
Vanquished Foes
Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)
Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black)
Ali Smith (The Accidental)
Carrie Tiffany (Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living)
Sarah Waters (The Night Watch)
Quite a bit of Booker overlap here, with The Night Watch on the 2006 shortlist and The Accidental on 2005’s. Coming dangerously close to a shared winner (it’ll never happen, right?!)
2006’s Booker winner was Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, which also showed up on the 2007 Women’s Prize shortlist.
Context
In 2006:
Saddam Hussein sentenced to death by hanging, and executed on December 30th
Seven bomb blasts in Mumbai, India, kill more than 200 people
Nathu La pass between India and China, sealed during the Sino-Indian War, re-opens for trade after 44 years
Montenegro declares independence from Serbia following a referendum
Commencement of Mexican War on Drugs with military intervention
Alexander Litvinenko dies in London having been poisoned by Polonium-210
Ban Ki-moon elected as new UN Secretary-General, succeeding Kofi Annan
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government overthrown in a military coup d'état
Military coup d'état in Fiji
Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet
UN votes to establish the UN Human Rights Council
Disney buys Pixar from Lucasfilm
Launch of Twitter
WikiLeaks.org domain first registered
Google buys YouTube
Release of Nintendo Wii in the US
Finnish band Lordi win Eurovision Song Contest with "Hard Rock Hallelujah"
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
John Boyne, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
The Da Vinci Code
James Bond: Casino Royale
Little Miss Sunshine
The Departed
Borat
Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
The Knife, Silent Shout
Life Lessons
Whatever their political alignment, male university professors should generally be avoided and certainly not married.
Everyone is in their own self-centred bubble and most of what matters passes by largely unnoticed while petty disputes take centre stage… ah, life!
Score
8
It’s a good read, like everything Smith writes. For me, it felt less exciting than some of her other work and, despite the grander sweep suggested by shifting the action to the US, actually felt more insular and narrow than her London-set novels.
I gave 2006 Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss a strong 9/10. Not everyone seemed to enjoy that one as much as I did!
Ranking to date:
Property (2003) - Valerie Martin - 9.5
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
Small Island (2004) - Andrea Levy - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
On Beauty (2006) - Zadie Smith - 8
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) - Lionel Shriver - 7.5
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
Next up
I’m going to check out a few older books from authors I enjoyed from this year’s Booker shortlist, starting with Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton, before getting back onto the Woman’s Prize with 2007’s winner Half of a Yellow Sun.
