On Beauty by Zadie Smith

One cannot expect too much excitement from a novel about college politics, middle aged marriages and white towns in New England. It’s just not there. The term middle of the road should have a picture of this book’s cover next to it in the dictionary. Not even Smith’s inventive, sometimes forcefully inventive writing, can save the subjects from their own banality. This is no White Teeth that carried its reader afloat upon its many entangled storylines to reach a final whirlpool where all the threads came together for the ultimate splash. To say that On Beauty is more subtle than this would be implying that that’s a good thing. Again Smith relies on the multiple storyline technique, giving each character his or her own voice as the narrators change from chapter to chapter. However the voices just don’t resound as much as they used to. Kiki Belsey, a character with a lot of investment from Smith, does not justify the effort. Jerome Belsey is a thin ghost of what was potentially a great opportunity for exploration – a born again Christian in an ultra liberal multi racial family. The two characters that truly inspire genuine fondness are Zora and Howard, even though they may be the least sympathetic. Howard is a self absorbed, white, English, art history professor, who truly does not consider anyone but himself in his pursuit of the aesthetic and his humanity shines through the dreariness of the text at the most unexpected moments. Zora too is an awkward goal oriented young girl, who will trample anyone on her way to whatever meaningless goal she set up for herself in order to avoid affection, which is oddly sweet. It’s quite easy to identify with the flawed in the novel, it’s the embodiments of human nobility that are a little hard to swallow. The plotlines too are a bit of a mess, none of the meticulous calculation that was so astounding in White Teeth. The so called Belsey – Kipps family feud, never comes to any fruition and never even has a profound effect on the main storylines. The book drags on till page 300 where it begins a head dashing race to the finish. Sure, those last pages are very exciting and have tons of really pornographic depictions of sex, but are they worth the uphill climb of the first 300? Umm…yes.