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Simon Cooke
posted 17 August 2006

With three novels, Zadie Smith has been nominated for 19 literary prizes in six years, and won nine. In 2000, her debut, the expansive multicultural family drama White Teeth, rocketed her to overnight success. With multicultural London on the one hand and the University of Cambridge on the other, she was down with the kids and in with the profs, wrote with 19th century scope and a mimic's versatility, and was, through no fault of her own, photogenic enough that no review section would resist placing her cover-shot prominently in any selection of 'writers' recommended summer readings'. Some of the issues arising from being a celebrity author - a tag Smith has frequently shied away from: 'I've written two books… Coetzee's an author!' - went into an exploration of anonymity and fame in her second novel, The Autograph Man. But, amid continued accolades and awards, the follow-up met with more equivocation on the part of the critics. Over-hyped?  

On Beauty, a favourite for the Booker Prize 2005 and now awarded the Orange Prize for Fiction 2006, has been a feature of the literary landscape for the best part of a year. Its profile cements Smith's standing as one of contemporary fiction's major voices, and Smith's most ambitious and finely executed book yet does much to justify its esteem. It's 443 many-peopled and many-themed pages engagingly and wittily explore any number of culture wars - liberal versus conservative politics; 'high' versus 'popular' arts; reason versus emotion - all within Smith's overarching interest in the ramifications of these broad debates on the emotional lives of individuals, and, in particular, her sensitive and insightful attentiveness to what Elizabeth Bishop called 'the strange idea of family'. Commensurate with its award-winning profile, and in fulfilment of Smith's eloquent spokesperson's position on her trade, On Beauty is also a novel infused with a vision of what the novel is for. This is both its greatest strength, and its weakness.

As homage to Forster's Howards End - both in basic plotline and feeling - On Beauty, even down to the essayistic title, seems written almost directly out of the imperatives set forth in Smith's 2003 Orange Word lecture on her acknowledged mentor - 'EM Forster's Ethical Style: Love, Failure and the Good in Fiction' - in which she makes her position clear in defence of 'love' as valid and ethically valuable in our engagement. Against what she sees as an academic sense of 'shame' over the emotive response to literature and the arts, she states her position:

My flag is rather weak in comparison. It says: 'When we read with fine attention, we find ourselves caring about people who are various, muddled, uncertain and not quite like us (and this is good)'.

Though 'fine attention' rhymes well with the 'close reading' associated with Cambridge (whose flag is not especially 'weak'), the cast of On Beauty is suitably various, muddled, and uncertain, and the most immediately impressive feat performed is in the way the book spins off in so many directions without losing dramatic momentum, and combines many oral registers while still conveying a coherent and distinct voice (informal emails stand beside arcane academic debates, rap lyrics beside TS Eliot…). Howard Belsey is a 50-plus white English academic teaching art history at the fictional New England 'Wellington College'. A political liberal and staunch rationalist working on an interminable treatise on the 'myth' of Rembrandt's greatness, he is married to the black, maternal and instinctive Kiki, but on the verge of losing her following an affair. Their three college-age children - Jerome, Zora and Levi - are each attempting to attach themselves to some idea that might define their identity (Christianity, intellectual pursuits, and rap and political activism respectively). The novel opens with Jerome finding his ideological ballast and first romantic love in the worst place possible for a Belsey: lodging with Howard's academic arch-rival Monty Kipps and family while studying in England. Seduced by the Trinidadian conservative academic's Christian faith, transcendentalist view of art, and anti-liberal views (he still refers to the 'coloured man' and vociferously condemns what he sees as the liberals' hypocritical censure of conservatism in the humanities) he then falls for the brilliant and beautiful daughter, Vee. Returning to Wellington with romantic dreams dashed, religious faith intact, disentanglement of the families proves impossible. Monty is offered tenure at Wellington, and the stage is set for a family drama set against the backdrop of the personal, political and intellectual wrangling of the 'campus novel'.

Smith occasionally intervenes in this 'muddled' drama with a third-person authorial voice ('as we have seen,'; 'We must now jump forward nine months,') and sometimes writes with the arch poise of Austen (or Forster sounding like Austen). Introducing Howard's physical attributes, 'his bottom lip's fullness goes some way towards compensating for the absence of the upper; his ears are not noticeable, which is all one can ask of ears'. The metaphors sometimes float off the page, as if the author's natural eloquence accelerates unaccompanied by deeper thought: 'the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings into bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people' sounds (ironically enough) more like an essayist attempting to encapsulate poetically one of the novelist's themes than part of the fibre of the novel itself.

Nonetheless, Smith has the satirist's fine ear for simile and its potential to expose the comic gap between reality and self-image (Monty Kipps' conceit is perfectly captured in the description of his interlocutor as being 'as if in an audience of one'). But the mimetic impulse behind simile also feeds into Smith's empathetic entry into the interiority of her characters. This is most interesting in relation to Howard, whose portrait forms the bulk of the book, because he represents something like the opposite of Smith's own standpoint. When the third person narrative records the 'flight from the rational, which was everywhere in evidence in the new century,' we are hearing Howard's exasperated voice contradicting the viewpoint of his author.

Like scholars in literature since Chaucer's Absolon, his rarefied intellectuality is comically contrasted with the messy business of his life. His position is best characterised by Vee Kipps, who becomes his most emotionally problematic, improper, student. She explains the shorthand whereby students send up each professor's class in terms of 'tomatoes'. 'To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato's Herstory' etc. Howard's class is 'all about never ever saying I like the tomato… nobody's pretending the tomato can save your life. Or make you happy. Or teach you how to live or ennoble you or be a great example of the human spirit…' It is instead 'properly intellectual'.

In keeping with her appeal to the value of 'love' in appreciation, Smith's opposition to this approach is evident from the start. She prefaces the book with nods to two academics each at the opposite end of the scholarly spectrum: Elaine Scarry, whose On Beauty and Being Just supplies Smith's title, argues that the appreciation of beauty, and attendance to the love of that beauty, is a directly ethical act that must be ushered back in to scholarly enterprise. Simon Schama is acknowledged for his 'monumental' Rembrandt's Eyes (written, he tells us, not with the 'authority of a connoisseur, but that of an engaged beholder'). Smith's final words in the author's note at the end of the book, responding to one of Howard's theories, are: 'I don't agree'

If this all seems too forcedly didactic, Smith is careful to complicate any simplistic categorisation of ideological standpoints. Her own views on aesthetic appreciation expressed in her essays are echoed by the self-important conservative Monty Kipps (his class is called 'Tomatoes save'). Ideas in the book are always, if not most essentially, an expression or repression of character, existing in continuity or contradiction with it, available as independently functioning systems but immediately altered, textured, when compounded with the interests, desires and fears of those who create or subscribe to them. Jerome Belsey, defying what the Belseys stand for by taking residence with the Kipps in London, 'had liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream' because it afforded him 'a blissful un-selfing; a summer of un-Belsey'. Howard's rigorously structural and rationalist understanding of Rembrandt, his obstinate rejection of his genius, is possible, so a colleague jokes, only because he has such a 'blissful family life'. In class, his daughter Zora senses she 'might have argued just as viciously and successfully the other way round' and wonders one of the novel's chief questions: 'Was anyone ever genuinely attached to anything?'

Howard's wife, Kiki, represents the ostensibly alternative approach to art and provides one answer to this question of 'attachment' - and here we hear the echo of Forster's dictat, Only connect the prose and the passion…'. She is 'glad she's not an intellectual'. While her husband asks students to see appreciation of genius as a social construct, his wife 'gasps' and 'clasped her hands' at the mention of one of her favourite artist's paintings: 'Oh my God - I love Edward Hopper. I can't believe that! He floors me... I'd love to see that. That's wonderful!'

At such a point, it is tempting to respond as a Howard might:

a) happy as we might be for Kiki, she doesn't tell us very much about Edward Hopper
b) Kiki might not herself want her response appropriated as an aesthetic or ethical standpoint
c) this emotive response is not so rare in academic discussion as might be imagined (cf critics, including the academic variety, frequently finding works 'breathtaking', 'stunning', and otherwise physically debilitating)
d) we should not ignore works that do not immediately make us swoon; sometimes a rational explanation of the value of a work of art is what opens it up to us and facilitates an emotional response
e) sometimes we value that which we do not love
f) we should be attentive to what it is that 'floors us' in a work of art, we can be intoxicated by the idea of our association with an 'elect' master
g) ugliness deserves our attention too, etc.

While this and other related debates are contained and made problematic within the novel, Smith nevertheless makes plain her stand. The very moving epiphany to which Howard is headed throughout finds him dumbstruck at his own lecture, able only to make 'the picture larger on the wall'. This is as the college's technical assistant, the author's namesake, 'Smith had explained to him how to do'. This last is the most overt way in which Smith tells us that she is teaching her teacher-protagonist a lesson.

Read as a lesson in this way, there is little urgency, since Smith 'knows' in advance that 'what the heart knows' is as important as what the brain works out; any 400-plus page novel dedicated to rehearsing the argument, demonstrating what it knows, would be tiresome and self-satisfied, however magnanimous the 'knowledge'. But Smith is, fortunately, too good a writer for this to mar the book. She is perhaps, as Woolf wrote of Forster, a 'light sleeper', often stirred by noises in the next room; and when she attends to these regions she does not profess to understand she is at her most effective. These areas seem to be located on the peripheries of the plot, and often take the form of vignettes that could almost stand alone.

When the youngest Belsey son Levi fakes his own 'street' credentials in a bid to take his place in an activist movement, the problem of authenticity, class, empathy, is presented and left compellingly unsolved (is his action valid?). When Howard visits his father, returning to his working class London roots to seek solace over his feared separation from Kiki only to have his father misunderstand and comfort him with racist explanations for her (non-existent) infidelities, the question of whether to give up deep convictions in toleration is left painfully unclear. Whenever the words 'odd' or 'strange' enter the narrative, Smith gives us the most to think about. Kiki responds to an unexpected compliment from Mrs Kipps with an enthusiastic 'thank you!' In the confused silence that follows, 'it was as if a sudden gust of wind had lifted and propelled this odd little conversation and now, just as suddenly, let it go'. This beautifully captures the sense of a connection being made between the two 'wives', the meaning of which has not yet been understood. Towards the end of the novel, as the Belseys begin to cohere in that family bond that Smith is so attuned to, she observes that 'It's strange how children, even grown children, will accept the instruction of a parent.'

Smith too, perhaps, is subject to this delicately noted law. And, in intent, On Beauty can seem to abide by it. But it is when Smith forgets her lesson - whether lessons learned or being taught - she has the most to teach us. As a young novelist she had reason to get out of the 'precocious' category, and this novel leaves no doubt that her promise was genuine; now she is there, this novel, for all its tremendous achievements, is most exciting in terms described by the novel's last words: as an 'intimation of what is to come'.