On Beauty and Zadie Smith

By Nicholas Desai | Monday, January 9, 2006

BOOK REVIEW

On Beauty
Zadie Smith
Penguin, 2005

One of the more despicable aspects of the "culture wars" is that anything remotely cultural must be drafted by either the conservative or liberal platoon. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good books do nothing. Deserters will be shot. When the recruiters get their filthy paws on Zadie Smith's latest novel, On Beauty, they will likely consider it wonderful: a large portion of the plot concerns the rivalry between a black, Christian, conservative professor-pundit and a white, atheist, liberal academic who is married to a black Floridian. Monty Kipps, the conservative, and Howard Belsey, the liberal, square off in explicitly political exchanges. Children rebel: Belsey's son converts to Christianity, while Kipps's daughter smokes weed and sleeps around. Both Rembrandt scholars, the professors lock horns over the purpose and meaning of art. Characters drop phrases like "neo-con" and "you liberals," sometimes seasoning their dialogue with passing references to 9/11, "the war," "the current President," "Condoleezza Rice," and more! It's relevant, you see! Who knew that lauded literature could read like a lightning round from the late Crossfire?

Smith has garnered as much acclaim for her subject matter as for her writing—her 1999 first novel White Teeth was hailed as a breakthrough portrait of multiculturalism—and she deserves credit for daring to place her characters on the set of such an ostensibly political fable. However, this scroll of policy references is just as much of a palimpsest as Howard's End, to which her plot and characters pay homage. That is to say, politics is not central. Like Forster's novel, On Beauty depicts divergent families, at once at odds and inextricably tied together. Given the weight of the baggage she took upon herself—politics, culture, race, visual art, hip-hop, the idea of the university, poetry, Howard's End—also give Smith credit for managing to create many characters who are neither merely spokesmen for a viewpoint nor verisimilitudinous "types." She is also funny with them. Finally, credit her for allowing Monty Kipps to exist—here is a conservative intellectual who is pompous, anachronistically dressed, and deeply flawed yet also eloquent, charismatic, self-aware, and conservative because of neither repressed sexual abuse nor sublimated self-hatred. In other words, a human. A lesser writer might have squashed him like a bug.

But the novel centers itself on the Belseys, who live near fictional Wellington University, outside of Boston. Howard, the husband, is an untenured professor of art history, an adulterer, a firm opponent of the cult of the Old Masters. He is married to Kiki, a hospital administrator, who once was thin but now is fat, and who is surrounded on all sides by chattering intellectuals (including two of her children). Her environs have taught her to gives thanks regularly that she isn't an intellectual. Shy, thoughtful Jerome, the eldest, has found Christianity and conservatism through an internship with the dread Monty Kipps, which infuriates Howard. Zora is confident in her intellect and confused by her relatively plain face.

Kiki is easily the most appealing character. She notices that since she has gained weight, more and more people call her "sister," unsolicited. Time has not effaced her beauty, but transformed it—yet she feels the same. Though ambitious when she was young and slightly regretful now, she is amazed at the sense of accomplishment that motherhood has given her. She plays dumb at cocktail parties when academics crack Shakespearean jokes. She also carries on a slightly discreet friendship with Mrs. Kipps, who lives in the neighborhood while her husband serves as a visiting professor at Wellington. Mrs. Kipps at first mystifies Kiki by casually advancing views that seem to Kiki straight out of the ancien regime; however, their relationship grows to be one of the most honest in the novel.

It is interesting to see how the story depicts relationships between black Americans and black non-Americans. The Belseys' youngest son Levi has renounced middle-class styles and speaks a hip-hop lingo. He dances down streets listening to his iPod, noting the disapproval of suburbanites, and fearing that his friends and co-workers might discover that he does not live in the ghetto, as he claims. His encounters with Haitian immigrants induce a strong commitment to "social justice," but despite his earnest efforts on their behalf (and insisting that they are "brothers"), he feels he cannot connect. Class divides as well. Carl, an aspiring rapper too poor (but bright enough) for college, whom both Levi and Zora try to trap in their spheres of influence, finally ends up perfectly content at a Wellington desk job—"hip-hop archivist"—which rather disappoints the two Belseys.

Smith has here the material for a good comic novel, but while there are funny observations and scenarios, she seems reluctant to light the fuse. Only a few characters—like the dean of the faculty—verge on ridiculous. It could be that she likes her characters too much to throw pies in their faces, but what really distracts her is this beauty business. I implied that Smith didn't take the political quips seriously except as a source of enmity among her characters but she evidently does have a dog in another fight, over aesthetics.

The title, On Beauty, has been cribbed from a sententious essay by Harvard English professor Elaine Scarry, who also supplies an epigraph. Smith also borrowed from her husband, the poet Nick Laird, a piece called "On Beauty," which he lent to her poetess character Claire. Here are some lines: "They are the damned. / The beautiful know this. / They stand around unnatural as statuary." Smith is troubled by beauty. (She told NPR that it annoyed her when critics mentioned her good looks, which implies that her dust jacket photo upped her books' sales.) The poem says that beauty damns people, and there is something chthonian and unsettling about the obsession it mercilessly effects in her story. Beauty is a dumb thing, arbitrarily meted out, and capable of reducing the most engaged intellectuals to lust or awe or silence.

Occasionally, this observation yields drab appeals for female self-esteem and against fashion magazines. A mistress complains to her lover that he doesn't see past her body, which is true. Some characters underestimate beauty, while Howard makes it his occupation to deny that it exists except in the attention-starved bourgeois imagination. He explains that his students are to interrogate "the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human…" and see that "these images as narration" are "implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius…" His class, he states, must strive "to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarified language of exclusion." This is the language of denigration: mythemes, privilege, exclusion, rarifying, and applying (as in, say, for a job at Carl's Jr.) signify something frivolous, arbitrary, or pretending true being.

An interesting, apparently superfluous passage tells the story of a precocious young girl from South Bend, Indiana, who longs for a more intellectual environment than the one found at her high school, which she dominated academically, and her name is Charlotte Simmons—er, Katie Armstrong. (Whatever.) An aspiring student of the arts, she wants only to be around people who love Rembrandt as much as she does. And practically the ideal studier, she prepares for a short discussion in Prof. Belsey's class by taking copious notes on two of Rembrandt's works. She notices aspects like perspective, lighting, and historical context, sure, but being a fast learner, she is already heavily informed by more impressive ideas, like latent homoeroticism and "liminality." However, in class, she encounters an incomprehensible discussion, in which the slightest comment can be termed the "privileging" of one thing or another, which is an impropriety. This is too momentous for Katie, only sixteen years old, who leaves without speaking a word, while the other students jump like lemmings into jargon and cant. What is this passage, which could be inserted into conservative critique of academia from the 1980s, doing here? Is this Howard's peculiar folly or The Way We Live Now? Meanwhile, as Howard "interrogates" beauty, he can't keep his eyes off of his stunning student, Victoria Kipps, the daughter of his archrival.

Sex is not quite the same as art criticism, of course. However, Howard's whole worldview meanders slowly toward an appreciation of what could be called the problem of beauty: it exists—it persists—but logic and language are inadequate for describing or challenging it. (Someone—maybe Elvis Costello—said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture.) Beauty reappears at the most inopportune times. Howard's second mistress asks him to talk dirty in bed, and he replies, "I do… I… you're so very…[what's the word he's searching for?] beautiful…" Ouch—and this to an admiring student. A mistake or a capitulation? It's ambiguous, but as soon as Howard connects the beauty of a real woman with the beauty of a painting of a woman, a silent impasse swells within him, and the book immediately ends.

There is a definite tension between Smith the funny inventor of characters and Smith the sage, who is supposed to deliver mind-blowing insights on globalization, multiculturalism, race, the sexes, and pop culture. Just between you and me, the insights are passable but nothing more—anyway, her comic novel is much better. An author who submits her characters, especially well-developed ones, to the whims of a philosophy can seem like a malevolent and exploitative god. Every once in a while, her creations have to attend to a chore, the advancement of a hidden essay.

Smith, a Briton, also spent some time "in residence" at Harvard, and so her view of America can be awkward and limited. (Her brief descriptive passages of London are twelve to fifteen times more assured than those of outer Boston.) But she nails the strangeness of intellectuals and universities, which is the best part of her book. At one point, Howard notices a student's t-shirt, whose back and front read "BEING" and "TIME" respectively. "He reminded Howard a little of Howard at the same age. Those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life." Ah, youth.

On Beauty and Zadie Smith

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