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50books_poc14)On Beauty by Zadie Smith
There are two kinds of readers of On Beauty- those who haven't read E.M. Forster's Howards End and those who have. Those who haven't will likely love the book- it's a beautiful, funny, and tragic story about a family growing up and growing apart amid a freshly contemporary swirl of cultural, social, and political tempests. It probably has Smith's deepest and realest characters yet. It's also her most straightforward novel, the one that requires the least work to get pleasure from. None of the rapid switches in perspective, attitude, approach, theme, or character that marked her previous two novels are here. Rather, this is a sedate if definitely contemporary novel of family life. I'd strongly recommend it, and gladly set it against anything else from the past ten years, purely on those terms.
For those who have read Howards Ends, though- and I frantically read it for the first time right before reading On Beauty, after developing a growing suspicion that I was missing something as I poked at Smith's first pages- On Beauty is an exhilarating, magnificent piece of writing that ascends to an even higher peak of achievement. It tells so many stories simultaneously with incredible grace and economy and wit. I can't tell you how excited I was to read every successive page.
But let's back up. Smith's first novel, White Teeth, marked her as a young talent with an unlimited ceiling. She received endless accolades, made the bestseller list, spawned imitators galore- and she was barely twenty. She also became prime target for a group of critics seeking to take aim at the movement of literature in the direction of a school of contemporary experimental writers- Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Salman Rushdie among the ones cited. In a review that became well-known, critic James Wood called White Teeth the paragon of a subgenre he termed 'hysterical realism' and criticized it for putting so many ideas and thoughts in such a tight density that all ideas began to become meaningless, serving as nothing more than parts of the incoherent soup. Smith, equally famously, publicly agreed with Wood about his criticisms, and in her next novel the frantic density of White Teeth was toned down significantly, though Wood still condemned the novel for failing to meet his criteria for a successful novel. Smith eventually salvoed back with "Two Paths For the Novel", ostensibly a review of novels by Joseph O'Neill and Tom McCarthy but really a manifesto about how post-modern technique could say things the kind of realist novel Wood was advocating were not merely incapable of but also unwilling to. The battle lines were drawn- Wood as the critical advocate of 21st century realism and Smith, both as critic and author the champion of that which ventures farther afield in search of meaning.
Enter On Beauty, a novel which at its surface level resembles the kind of novel Wood likes, a realistic novel that feels consciously old-fashioned. It feels that way because it is. Smith- and I can't tell you how long I chortled when I realized this- rewrites Forster's Howards End very nearly scene by scene. Forster's novel begins "One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister." Smith's novel begins "One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father." And then she throws at the reader a series of emails closely patterned after Helen's letters, introducing the reader to a plot that is practically identical to its inspiration. A story about particular types of opposites attracting and repelling and forming lives together. At the most basic level we might say that Smith has discovered how to have her cake and eat it too- she can write a straightforward, linear, traditional narrative without disruption or entropy overwhelming it and yet still be able to make endless allusions. Because almost all of her allusions are to the same source text the novel's structural integrity is not damaged by the borrowing.
Smith is directly giving the reader a choice about what kind of novel they prefer to read. If you like books like Howards End, books that challenge you intellectually yet make fundamentally emotional appeals, read On Beauty straightforwardly and be happy. If you like novels like White Teeth, books that have emotional teeth given to them via intellectual gamesmanship, compare Howards End to On Beauty and play the intellectual games along with Smith. But what's exciting is the choice itself, which is the same choice I referred to above- the battle lines drawn between Wood and Smith. Smith is embedding the literary conflict not only in the narrative of her book, but in its very fabric.
Howards End was written in 1910 and set in Pre-War England, and it tells the story of the three half-German, half-English Schlegel siblings after the death of their parents and their negotiations with life as moneyed people in England. The novel quivers with unexpected resonance as a story about a world about to be destroyed. The three liberal Schlegel struggle with their attraction to a family of conservative, practical, old-money gentry, the Wilcoxes, sort out fiscal and practical challenges, and try to figure out what it is that gives value to their lives. The novel's powerful, unexpected climax comes from the introduction of a young clerk, financially and socially far below both the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, whose introduction to the families throws everybody phenomenally off-balance.
On Beauty was written in 2005 and is set in Post-9/11 Boston and London. It tells the story of a family with a white English father, Howard Belsey and a black American mother, Kiki, in a liberal college campus environment, struggling with a variety of relationships with a black Caribbean, conservative intellectual and his family and with each other. The young clerk in this edition is a black street rapper who gets inducted via a side door into the Belsey/Kipps collegiate milieu.
If Howards End is unsettlingly about a world that the first World War is preparing to obliterate, On Beauty is about a world thrown out of balance by the September 11th attacks, which coincidentally fall on Howard and Kiki's anniversary. This is by no means a novel about 9/11 but it is certainly a story about how 9/11 changed the way we look at the world. The struggles between conservatism and liberalism, as writ small in arguments about efforts toward diversity on campus, take on grand resonances in the aftermath. Smith shows why what appear to be purely intellectual arguments matter. Smith shows why politics aren't something a person can beg out of, as she enlists unlikely Levi, the hip-hop quoting, gangster-emulating third child of Howard and Kiki, as he undergoes an awkward and hilarious awakening about his position of privilege in the black middle class. She shows why art isn't something you can beg out of as she converts the disputed estate Howard End from the original novel into a painting of the Haitian deity Erzulie that takes on a different meaning for every character in the story, reducing many of them to tears.
Smith demands engagement from her reader. She demands engagement in politics, art, culture, social justice, history, life. "I don't care what you believe!" Kiki shouts at Howard in a climactic scene. "I just want you to believe something!' There is much about On Beauty that is clever, subtle, witty. There is nothing at all that is cynical. Smith recasts the argument between herself and Wood by positioning herself on the same side as Wood in opposing irony. Where she differs is that she doesn't believe that realism is the only gateway to sincerity. Hysterical realism, as I've long argued about books like White Teeth and Infinite Jest, is deeply, desperately sincere. It's just more skeptical that a straightforward attempt to always tell the truth is going to lead to sincerity.
Oh, there's so much I want to talk about this book. I want to dig apart Howard's repulsion to Rembrandt and the construction of the human. I want to play with the way Smith's narrator uses light in relation to the way Rembrandt does. I want to make sense of Levi's relationships with Carl and Choo. I want to know what makes Vee tick. I want to figure out why Zora speaks so compellingly to me and work out why I still can't figure out where she went so horribly wrong. I want to babble about how relieved I was when I realized that Carl didn't have to die. Everything about On Beauty made me think, made me dream, made me love.
And perhaps most of all I loved the game she dared me to play, of following along the allusions to Howards End and working through their implications and resolutions. I knew what would happen next most of the time, but that only made me more excited to see how she would do it. These were characters caught in a web they were completely unaware of, repeating events they wouldn't dream of comparing to their own lives. And the deviations were as exciting as the correspondences. Margaret Schlegel could have never, ever pursued the lawsuit against Henry that Kiki pursues against Monty, not only because of their familial situation but also because it would have been a betrayal of Mrs. Wilcox. But Kiki's reevaluation of the situation, determined by the parallels to the source text but not constrained by them, is a celebration of a century of changing attitudes. On Beauty reinvigorates Howards End but refuses to be enslaved by its determinations. Though I think it is tied to Howards End and restricted by it, in some senses a novel hesitant to color too far outside its lines.
That hesitation enriches the story, but also determines Smith's horse in the theoretical race. It's the mark of Forster (One may as well begin), of Dickens (Whether I am the hero of my own life's story), of Shakespeare (To be or not to be), and I think, all great authors. Doubt and confusion and uncertainty and an unwillingness to be right if it means dismissing other possibilities. Smith offers her readers the choice about how to read the novel because she doesn't know what the right answer is. She's young and black and female and a genius and a polarizing figure and... sometimes she thinks James Wood is right about her writing. Sometimes she disagrees with him. Smith offers a future of the novel that is binary- two paths for the novel, as her famous essay described. And then, in the actual story she describes characters who are struggling with other kinds of binaries- love your wife or don't love your wife. Divorce or stay together. Join the middle class or stay on the street. Stay in the middle class or affiliate with those who are hurting. Remember your past or look toward your future. Liberalism or Conservatism. Sex or abstinence. But none of those binaries resolve cleanly. I always roll my eyes when I hear people say that something isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Like the Kiki quote from above, I want people to declare that they believe something, not in the infinity of chaos. But her characters do find something in between binaries and meaningless infinities. Kiki and Howard end up separated, their lives still intertwined but in a newly negotiated way. And they still love each other, but not the way they thought they had. Monty Kipps's compassionate conservatism is revealed to be a crock of lies by Carl, yet Kiki discovers in its hidden corners things that surprise her and nourish her. And I think likewise the receptive reader of On Beauty can find a negotiated middle ground between dogmatic realism and incoherent macrofiction. It's certainly a journey worth undertaking.
And I'm again I'm back to paths and journeys, a metaphor that seduces Smith with its claims of movement to a destination. Fundamentally, isn't the thing that separates the novel from real life the narrative, the idea of tracing a path through a life that begins in Point A and ends up in Point B? I think a healthy skepticism about the correspondence between a novelistic narrative and reality is the hallmark of the modern reader, but I understand why Smith finds narratives seductive. I do, too, and I think On Beauty is a gem of a seductive narrative, no matter how you choose to read it.
tags: a:smith zadie, caribbean-british, postmodernist
There are two kinds of readers of On Beauty- those who haven't read E.M. Forster's Howards End and those who have. Those who haven't will likely love the book- it's a beautiful, funny, and tragic story about a family growing up and growing apart amid a freshly contemporary swirl of cultural, social, and political tempests. It probably has Smith's deepest and realest characters yet. It's also her most straightforward novel, the one that requires the least work to get pleasure from. None of the rapid switches in perspective, attitude, approach, theme, or character that marked her previous two novels are here. Rather, this is a sedate if definitely contemporary novel of family life. I'd strongly recommend it, and gladly set it against anything else from the past ten years, purely on those terms.
For those who have read Howards Ends, though- and I frantically read it for the first time right before reading On Beauty, after developing a growing suspicion that I was missing something as I poked at Smith's first pages- On Beauty is an exhilarating, magnificent piece of writing that ascends to an even higher peak of achievement. It tells so many stories simultaneously with incredible grace and economy and wit. I can't tell you how excited I was to read every successive page.
But let's back up. Smith's first novel, White Teeth, marked her as a young talent with an unlimited ceiling. She received endless accolades, made the bestseller list, spawned imitators galore- and she was barely twenty. She also became prime target for a group of critics seeking to take aim at the movement of literature in the direction of a school of contemporary experimental writers- Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Salman Rushdie among the ones cited. In a review that became well-known, critic James Wood called White Teeth the paragon of a subgenre he termed 'hysterical realism' and criticized it for putting so many ideas and thoughts in such a tight density that all ideas began to become meaningless, serving as nothing more than parts of the incoherent soup. Smith, equally famously, publicly agreed with Wood about his criticisms, and in her next novel the frantic density of White Teeth was toned down significantly, though Wood still condemned the novel for failing to meet his criteria for a successful novel. Smith eventually salvoed back with "Two Paths For the Novel", ostensibly a review of novels by Joseph O'Neill and Tom McCarthy but really a manifesto about how post-modern technique could say things the kind of realist novel Wood was advocating were not merely incapable of but also unwilling to. The battle lines were drawn- Wood as the critical advocate of 21st century realism and Smith, both as critic and author the champion of that which ventures farther afield in search of meaning.
Enter On Beauty, a novel which at its surface level resembles the kind of novel Wood likes, a realistic novel that feels consciously old-fashioned. It feels that way because it is. Smith- and I can't tell you how long I chortled when I realized this- rewrites Forster's Howards End very nearly scene by scene. Forster's novel begins "One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister." Smith's novel begins "One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father." And then she throws at the reader a series of emails closely patterned after Helen's letters, introducing the reader to a plot that is practically identical to its inspiration. A story about particular types of opposites attracting and repelling and forming lives together. At the most basic level we might say that Smith has discovered how to have her cake and eat it too- she can write a straightforward, linear, traditional narrative without disruption or entropy overwhelming it and yet still be able to make endless allusions. Because almost all of her allusions are to the same source text the novel's structural integrity is not damaged by the borrowing.
Smith is directly giving the reader a choice about what kind of novel they prefer to read. If you like books like Howards End, books that challenge you intellectually yet make fundamentally emotional appeals, read On Beauty straightforwardly and be happy. If you like novels like White Teeth, books that have emotional teeth given to them via intellectual gamesmanship, compare Howards End to On Beauty and play the intellectual games along with Smith. But what's exciting is the choice itself, which is the same choice I referred to above- the battle lines drawn between Wood and Smith. Smith is embedding the literary conflict not only in the narrative of her book, but in its very fabric.
Howards End was written in 1910 and set in Pre-War England, and it tells the story of the three half-German, half-English Schlegel siblings after the death of their parents and their negotiations with life as moneyed people in England. The novel quivers with unexpected resonance as a story about a world about to be destroyed. The three liberal Schlegel struggle with their attraction to a family of conservative, practical, old-money gentry, the Wilcoxes, sort out fiscal and practical challenges, and try to figure out what it is that gives value to their lives. The novel's powerful, unexpected climax comes from the introduction of a young clerk, financially and socially far below both the Schlegels and Wilcoxes, whose introduction to the families throws everybody phenomenally off-balance.
On Beauty was written in 2005 and is set in Post-9/11 Boston and London. It tells the story of a family with a white English father, Howard Belsey and a black American mother, Kiki, in a liberal college campus environment, struggling with a variety of relationships with a black Caribbean, conservative intellectual and his family and with each other. The young clerk in this edition is a black street rapper who gets inducted via a side door into the Belsey/Kipps collegiate milieu.
If Howards End is unsettlingly about a world that the first World War is preparing to obliterate, On Beauty is about a world thrown out of balance by the September 11th attacks, which coincidentally fall on Howard and Kiki's anniversary. This is by no means a novel about 9/11 but it is certainly a story about how 9/11 changed the way we look at the world. The struggles between conservatism and liberalism, as writ small in arguments about efforts toward diversity on campus, take on grand resonances in the aftermath. Smith shows why what appear to be purely intellectual arguments matter. Smith shows why politics aren't something a person can beg out of, as she enlists unlikely Levi, the hip-hop quoting, gangster-emulating third child of Howard and Kiki, as he undergoes an awkward and hilarious awakening about his position of privilege in the black middle class. She shows why art isn't something you can beg out of as she converts the disputed estate Howard End from the original novel into a painting of the Haitian deity Erzulie that takes on a different meaning for every character in the story, reducing many of them to tears.
Smith demands engagement from her reader. She demands engagement in politics, art, culture, social justice, history, life. "I don't care what you believe!" Kiki shouts at Howard in a climactic scene. "I just want you to believe something!' There is much about On Beauty that is clever, subtle, witty. There is nothing at all that is cynical. Smith recasts the argument between herself and Wood by positioning herself on the same side as Wood in opposing irony. Where she differs is that she doesn't believe that realism is the only gateway to sincerity. Hysterical realism, as I've long argued about books like White Teeth and Infinite Jest, is deeply, desperately sincere. It's just more skeptical that a straightforward attempt to always tell the truth is going to lead to sincerity.
Oh, there's so much I want to talk about this book. I want to dig apart Howard's repulsion to Rembrandt and the construction of the human. I want to play with the way Smith's narrator uses light in relation to the way Rembrandt does. I want to make sense of Levi's relationships with Carl and Choo. I want to know what makes Vee tick. I want to figure out why Zora speaks so compellingly to me and work out why I still can't figure out where she went so horribly wrong. I want to babble about how relieved I was when I realized that Carl didn't have to die. Everything about On Beauty made me think, made me dream, made me love.
And perhaps most of all I loved the game she dared me to play, of following along the allusions to Howards End and working through their implications and resolutions. I knew what would happen next most of the time, but that only made me more excited to see how she would do it. These were characters caught in a web they were completely unaware of, repeating events they wouldn't dream of comparing to their own lives. And the deviations were as exciting as the correspondences. Margaret Schlegel could have never, ever pursued the lawsuit against Henry that Kiki pursues against Monty, not only because of their familial situation but also because it would have been a betrayal of Mrs. Wilcox. But Kiki's reevaluation of the situation, determined by the parallels to the source text but not constrained by them, is a celebration of a century of changing attitudes. On Beauty reinvigorates Howards End but refuses to be enslaved by its determinations. Though I think it is tied to Howards End and restricted by it, in some senses a novel hesitant to color too far outside its lines.
That hesitation enriches the story, but also determines Smith's horse in the theoretical race. It's the mark of Forster (One may as well begin), of Dickens (Whether I am the hero of my own life's story), of Shakespeare (To be or not to be), and I think, all great authors. Doubt and confusion and uncertainty and an unwillingness to be right if it means dismissing other possibilities. Smith offers her readers the choice about how to read the novel because she doesn't know what the right answer is. She's young and black and female and a genius and a polarizing figure and... sometimes she thinks James Wood is right about her writing. Sometimes she disagrees with him. Smith offers a future of the novel that is binary- two paths for the novel, as her famous essay described. And then, in the actual story she describes characters who are struggling with other kinds of binaries- love your wife or don't love your wife. Divorce or stay together. Join the middle class or stay on the street. Stay in the middle class or affiliate with those who are hurting. Remember your past or look toward your future. Liberalism or Conservatism. Sex or abstinence. But none of those binaries resolve cleanly. I always roll my eyes when I hear people say that something isn't binary, it's a spectrum. Like the Kiki quote from above, I want people to declare that they believe something, not in the infinity of chaos. But her characters do find something in between binaries and meaningless infinities. Kiki and Howard end up separated, their lives still intertwined but in a newly negotiated way. And they still love each other, but not the way they thought they had. Monty Kipps's compassionate conservatism is revealed to be a crock of lies by Carl, yet Kiki discovers in its hidden corners things that surprise her and nourish her. And I think likewise the receptive reader of On Beauty can find a negotiated middle ground between dogmatic realism and incoherent macrofiction. It's certainly a journey worth undertaking.
And I'm again I'm back to paths and journeys, a metaphor that seduces Smith with its claims of movement to a destination. Fundamentally, isn't the thing that separates the novel from real life the narrative, the idea of tracing a path through a life that begins in Point A and ends up in Point B? I think a healthy skepticism about the correspondence between a novelistic narrative and reality is the hallmark of the modern reader, but I understand why Smith finds narratives seductive. I do, too, and I think On Beauty is a gem of a seductive narrative, no matter how you choose to read it.
tags: a:smith zadie, caribbean-british, postmodernist
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Date: 2011-07-14 05:49 pm (UTC)I really loved White Teeth, though. I think that kind of brash exuberance is better for Smith. (A less depressing Kureishi, maybe? IDK.)
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Date: 2011-07-14 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-15 02:32 pm (UTC)Also as a serious reader of postmodernist literature and a serious reader of fanfiction, derivative stoppped seeming like a criticism to me ages and ages ago. It's hard to tell which of my two primary literary communities steals more from other authors.