Book Report: On Beauty

6. Zadie Smith, On Beauty (2005) (3/24/26)

I enjoyed this book well enough. The writing itself is spectacular, and Smith has an amazing way with dialogue. She gives us all the trickiness of interpersonal relationships, whether that comes from the passage of time, differing philosophies of life, class and race disparities, or simply assumptions made. 

The story, which a NYT book review tells me is based loosely on E. M. Forster's Howards End (which I have not read), focuses on a family living in an upscale Boston neighborhood, where the father, 57-year-old Howard Belsey, is a tenureless art historian, white and British, who has recently cheated on his wife, Kiki, African-American and a nurse, less intellectual but certainly not stupid. They have three children, two in college, one still in high school but increasingly hanging out with some Haitian rights activists. Howard's rival, a Trinidadian scholar, comes to town, a visiting professor at Howard's Ivy League–ish college—they both study Rembrandt, drawing very different conclusions about his work, his intentions; and they occupy opposite ends of the political spectrum. This man, Monty, also has a wife and two children, all of whom are woven into the story. And there's a rapper who stumbles into this rarefied environment.

All of which are just some of the characters and details of a constantly shifting story of constantly shifting self-understandings and desires, of time passing and connections made and lost, of strivings and settlings and abandonments, of power plays and deep satisfactions and regrets. It's life.

When I say I enjoyed it "well enough," I'm not sure if I mean I wasn't quite in the mood for what amounts to a multiple-character study, that I would have appreciated a bit more of a plot, or a, I dunno, point? What I'm left with most is how accomplished the writing is, but the story itself is more like a kaleidoscope, giving me no fixed image. Except possibly the very end, where Howard is finally presenting his lecture that could, he hopes, win him tenure—only, in the confusion of reaching the venue late, he left his notes in the car. 

Howard pressed the red button again. A picture came up. He waited a minute and then pressed it once more. Another picture. He kept pressing. People appeared: angels and staalmeesters and merchants and surgeons and students and writers and peasants and kings and the artist himself. And the artist himself. And the artist himself. The man from Pomona began to nod appreciatively. Howard pressed the red button. He could hear Jack French saying to his eldest son, in his characteristically loud whisper: You see, Ralph, the order is meaningful. Howard pressed the red button. Nothing happened. He had come to the end of the line. He looked out and spotted Kiki, smiling into her lap. The rest of the audience were faintly frowning at the back wall. Howard turned his head and looked at the picture behind him.
     'Hendrickje Bathing, 1654,' croaked Howard and said no more.

     On the wall, a pretty, blousy Dutch woman in a simple white smock paddled in water up to her calves. Howard's audience looked at her and then at Howard and then at the woman once more, awaiting elucidation. The woman, for her part, looked away, coyly, into the water. She seemed to be considering whether to wade deeper. The surface of the water was dark, reflective—a cautious bather could not be certain of what lurked beneath. Howard looked at Kiki. In her face, his life. Kiki looked up suddenly at Howard—not, he thought, unkindly. Howard said nothing. Another silent minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly. Howard made the picture larger on the wall as Smith had explained to him how to do. The woman's fleshiness filled the wall. He looked out into the audience once more and saw Kiki only. He smiled at her. She smiled. She looked away, but she smiled. Howard looked back at the woman on the wall, Rembrandt's love, Hendrickje. Though her hands were imprecise blurs, painted heaped on paint and roiled with the brush, the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety—chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come.

That's how the book ends: the final paragraphs. (It doesn't spoil anything—well, nothing important—to quote it.) It reminds me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I likewise made my way through enjoying the writing but not quite sure what it all added up to—until the final page, which knocked me out it was so exquisite. This rich book might also transform in my mind from "good enough" to eternally memorable. I guess time will tell.