Book Review: "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

I recently read this and enjoyed it a lot. The main thing I liked is that the characters are engaging and believable. It's about two families, one mixed race and one black, the fathers / husbands of which are both college professors. These two guys are at opposite ends of the political and critical (they are both art historians) spectrum and are involved in some kind of arguement, but the best bits of the book are not about them or their squabble; the best bits (and most of the book) are about the family of the white guy his mixed race family and a young rapper they come into contact with.

The book is about middle class black families living and working in a university town, and probably some people will find their lives a little easy. These people don't have real problems like some of the people they meet; they are protected from trouble by their wealth, but I still found Kiki, Zora, Levi, Jerome and Howard (the father) compelling, even when I was wincing at the things they put themselves through. Howard in particular, even though he's obviously a very intelligent guy, does some very stupid things, apparently designed to hurt those he loves and by proxy himself. Howard blunders around the book like a big bear, taking whatever is close by. There's a scene where the family are at a funeral and Howard decides he can't take it anymore, so he leaves the church and goes to visit his father, who he has not seen for several years. The two men can't communicate and in a very well observed scene Howard soon loses patience and walks out on his dad.

Zora and Levi are the two younger children and a lot of the book is about them and how they struggle with their contradictory lives. Levi wants to be a cool bro'. He meets some young haitians selling pirate dvds on the streets and soon he wants to bury himself in their cause, but he can't admit to them where he's from and pretends he's from the poorer part of town. Zora wants to be respected for her equality politics but her father is the professor. She campaigns for a young local black rapper to be allowed to attend the same poetry course as her, but she herself has been allowed on the course by means of political machination.

What makes all this such a great read is the understanding with which it's written. I felt these people could really exist and Zadie Smith had been living with them for months at a time, sharing their private thoughts and even when they made their stupid mistakes I could feel with them.

For the first few pages I wondered whether I was just going to find the book a flat farce about ridiculous people at university (it vaguely remined me of the Wilt books), but it soon got going and proved to be a lot better than that. We could have had more sympathetic treatment of Professor Kipps, Howard's reactionary nemesis, and his attractive daughter Victoria, but the one I would like to have heard more from was Jerome, Howard's christian son, who has gone to live and work with Professor Kipps and fallen in love with Victoria (thus a double betrayal of his father). Perhaps it's the false tone of the emails at the start of the book that let the book down to begin with, but I never got to feel for Jerome in the way that I did for the others; a pity, since the tension setup by his "betrayals" sets up the first great scene, where Howard shows up at the Kipps residence in an effort to sort the sorry business out. I get the feeling Zadie Smith doesn't empathise with christians very much, perhaps her talent led her to conjure up Jerome too easily - a stronger Jerome would have given the Belsy family more depth I feel. This is only a slight criticism of a very good book, which made me want to go back and read her others as soon as I can.