Review / On Beauty by Zadie Smith

It’s been sixteen years since Zadie Smith’s Orange Prize-winning On Beauty was published, and perhaps our standards for London's literary darling have shifted. This book, which was shortlisted for the Booker and lost out to Banville’s The Sea, has all the strengths that we have come to associate with Smith: her sardonic dissection of campus politics, unscrupulously laying bare the inconsistencies of liberal academia and the moral tug-of-war for college culture that still feels as relevant today as it did in 2005. And the book is rich with moments of crystalline prose (think: “Umbrellas, like dead birds after a shooting party, pile up in the far corner”). However, the book’s most lauded achievement —its polyphonic close third person—leaves the reader feeling as though some characters are less than fully drawn. Professor Howard Belsey is the most successful character—a weak man who, until his marriage has almost completely disintegrated, displays true love only for the things that ruin his happiness. But despite his multiple affairs, Howard essentially exists in a vacuum. His disengagement with other characters as characters, his children in particular, impoverishes the entire cast.

The book loses momentum after the revelation of Howard’s first affair, as his marriage enters a kind of catatonic state. For most of the second half of the book, it is unclear what the stakes are. If they are, as Howard at one point claims, the “moral soul of the college,” this imperative is submerged for some time to a series of extended personal reckonings, which feel both as though they ought to take precedence in structuring the plot, but also as though they only ever amount to a series of encounters, enmities and romances driving to no particular end. In On Beauty’s literary inspiration, Howard’s End, it’s very clear that what is at stake is the house—a device that imbues the plot with quite a material tension. However, what’s left to Kiki Belsey is a painting—sentimental but not fundamentally life changing. It’s a token rather than a crucible. And consequently, the book suffers from quite a low ebb of motivation after the high tide of the first half.

It becomes clear, eventually, that the true battle is for the moral soul of the book, as the transient close third person moves through a series of ethical perspectives. Is the soul of the book Kiki, whose openness to new ideas reflects what ought to be the more innocent project of a liberal arts college? Or is it Choo, who emerges through a slightly contrived set of run-ins, as Levi’s embattled Haitian friend? Certainly it cannot be Howard, who is destroyed as much by his own liberal orthodoxy as his personal infidelity. Ultimately, in keeping with the culture wars that it so effectively lampoons, On Beauty leaves us not with any conviction about the right perspective, but rather a miasma of wrong ones. The road to Wellington College is paved with good intentions.