Title: On Beauty
Author: Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith's On Beauty has been on my reading list for a while. Apparently she's the it-girl of the day in the literary world. This is her third published novel, and she was born in 1975. And just so I could feel inferior (since we share a birth year and have never published anything other than this blog), I made sure I didn't pass by this novel.
It's hard to write a short summary of On Beauty, but essentially it's the story of a family, the Belsleys. Howard, the dad, is a liberal white Englishman teaching art history at a suburban Boston college. Kiki, the mom, is an African American nurse, and everyone in the family seems to be drifting. They keep coming into contact in uncomfortable ways with the Kipps family, led by their patriarch, Monty, who is Howard's academic and political arch-nemesis.
Smith does a great job of drawing characters and creating dialogue, but the book is neither a quick nor an easy read. I read some lists of "beach reads" earlier this summer and saw this book on several, but unless you're going to a secluded beach and bringing a great pair of sunglasses and a lot of sunblock, I think you're going to find yourself distracted. I normally breeze through a book or two a week, and this one took me more like 10 days. That probably means I wasn't that into it.
Anyway, the ending reminded me a little bit of a French film. You know, in American films the stereotype is that we always get impossibly happy endings. French films, on the other hand, seem to go out of their way to give ambiguous or unhappy endings. In the end of On Beauty, I got the same feeling of "oh, ok then" that I often had walking out of international cinema as a college student. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
--originally published 9/27/06
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