“If you ask me what I have come to do in this world…I will reply: I’m here to live my life out loud.”
Emile Zola
I often participate in book rings where a group of people read the same book one after the other, leaving journal comments about the book and passing it on to the next person. One such book that I recently read was “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005. I kept seeing the title on all the lists of books one must read so I signed on to the book ring.
Smith is from North London and “On Beauty”is her third novel. Despite the fact that I disagreed with many of the review blurbs in the front of the book, I loved it and will treasure it. I did not find it to be at all comedic as a number of the reviewers quoted, instead finding it to be an incisively tragic look into the state of families.
The story of “On Beauty” takes place in New England at a small college outside of Boston. Montague (Monty) Kipps and Howard (Howie) Belsey are both professors, both have written (or are writing) books on Rembrandt, both have lived in London, both have strong black wives and several college aged children, and both have cheated on their wives.
That’s where the similarities end and the entanglements begin. Though they each are enamored of studying Rembrandt, Kipps loves him and Belsey loathes him and all representational art. Belsey and his non-religious, extremely liberal, feminist, affirmative-action loving family are having a hard time communicating and often seem to explode apart from each other at the family home which they inherited from Belsey’s wife’s mother and moved to from London ten years earlier. Kipps and his conservative, devoted church-going family on the other hand collect Caribbean artwork, are affirmative-action haters, and so devoted to each other and the idea of family as to almost suffocate each other with their closeness. At a point when the two men are virtually career rivals, Kipps is invited to join the faculty of Wellington College. At least he and Belsey are in two different departments. Kipps is in the African Studies department and Belsey is in the Humanities department teaching esoteric art history courses that all the students would like to take but decide not to when it comes down to the wire. The College has proposed a series of lectures by the two that highlight their differences of opinion. Oh, and by the way, though this may seem small to some of us, Belsey is the only white member of his family and until the Kippses arrived, his family were one of few black families in a sea of white.
Before the Kippses moved to the Boston suburb, they were firmly ensconced in a poor neighborhood in London where he ran his Christian charities for the benefit of the poor in the Caribbean from where he and his wife Carlene came—he from Trinidad, she from another, smaller island. Jerome Belsey (the eldest of the Belsey children) took an internship with him and when he got into a spot of financial trouble the Kippses took him in where he fell in love with everything about them including their familial closeness, their religion, and their daughter Victoria. Howard was outraged that Jerome planned to end the feud between the fathers ala Romeo and Juliet and flew to London to retrieve his son. Unfortunately, Vee had already broken Jerome’s heart and thrown another log on the fire of the Kipps/Belsey conflagration.
After the Kippses move in down the street, Carlene and Howard’s wife Kiki become, as they put it “shelters from the storm” for each other, Howard is seduced by Monty’s “daddy-issues” daughter Victoria, and Vee becomes an academic rival of Howard’s daughter, Zora. And those are just the highlights. Every time one of the characters does something loving for another sibling, child or parent, it is offset by them doing something equally unloving to one of the others. In the end they are all confronted by having to see themselves in the mirror of their family and forced to grow up. My heart strings were so raveled by the end of this novel that I simply ached.
Smith’s insight into families, colleges, race relations, and teenagers was spot on and the dialog, plot and characters were genuine in all respects.
