On beauty : a novel

On Beauty was written by Zadie Smith, who is the same age as E.M. Forster when Howard's End [ISBN: 0679406689] was published. This is a nice parallel as she explicitly evokes Forster's novel as a model. I owe this interesting fact to Frank Kermode's review of the book in the London Review of Books [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n19/kerm01_.html], which emphasises and explicates the Forster parallel. And On Beauty does have a social texture and a richness of character that seems to belong to an earlier period.

Set largely in a fictional college near Boston, it also has some action in the diverse London familiar from Smith's earlier work. The Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Forster's novel are parallelled here by the Belseys and the Kipps. A part of the context of the work is what would have been called the 'culture wars', as the professorial fathers in each family are divided by academic issues. But this is not quite the narrowing it suggests, as, certainly in Howard Belsey's case, his intellectual positions are very much bound up with the more general course of a life come unstuck in various ways. And certainly, the narrowing to an academic environment gives a social structure and a context which is readily 'available' for use in the novel, and can be readily moved in like scenery. This is not to say that the academic context is not uninterestingly described, or indeed that other realities do not intrude.

An interesting difference is that the lines between the sensibilities and values of the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels gestured to big issues of social expectation and of political preference. But they moved in a restricted milieu. The issues here seem much more diffuse, in part a sign of changed times: perhaps no set of issues can be 'central'. One aspect of that change is the freedom with which communications and people move between countries, and milieux. However, although the families straddle the US and the UK, and although some of the action moves between those countries, we were strangely insulated from broader consideration of transatlantic differences of value and culture, a topic which surely would have been of some interest to actual families in their positions.

One of the less successful parts of Forster's novel is the Leonard Bast character, whose participation seems incompletely worked through. Bast represents another life. Here, the Bast analog is Carl, a rapper from Boston, whose life crosses that of the Belsey's and who comes to work in the University. Carl's character may work better than Bast's, I think, but his story also seems incomplete. One Belsey son also interacts with some Haitian immigrants, who are amused by the gap between his desire to be one with them and his privileged background. In fact, the Belseys are much more center-stage than the Kipps throughout the novel.

I said that the novel has a plenitude that reminds one of an earlier period. Yet it is right-up-date in its idioms. It is written in a wonderfully assured way, and there are lots of moments to remember. For example, the following paragraph has been in my head since I read it several weeks ago. "At Paddington the doors opened and he stepped into the warm smog of the station. He wound his scarf into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He was no tourist and did not look about him, not at the sheer majesty of interior space, nor at that intricate greenhouse ceiling of patterned glass and steel. He walked straight out to the open air, where he might roll a cigarette and smoke it."I have arrived in Paddinton hundreds of times, and this seems so right. She evokes the grandeur of the place as well as the traveller's routine, enclosed behavior. These intersect on the page, though not in Howard Belsey's perception as he hurries through the station.This is a novel you do not want to finish, and once finished, makes you look forward eagerly for her next.

updated. 2 August 2008