Product Description

Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction and from the celebrated author of White Teeth comes another bestselling masterwork

Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith’s reputation as a major literary talent.

Named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, Time, and Publishers Weekly A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Denver Post, and Publishers Weekly bestseller A Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Atlantic Monthly, Newsday, Christian Science Monitor, and Minneapolis Star Tribune Best Book of the Year Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17798 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780143037743
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
In an author's note at the end of On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes: "My largest structural debt should be obvious to any E.M. Forster fan; suffice it to say he gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with new material as best I could." If it is true that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Forster, perched on a cloud somewhere, should be all puffed up with pride. His disciple has taken Howards End, that marvelous tale of class difference, and upped the ante by adding race, politics, and gender. The end result is a story for the 21st century, told with a perfect ear for everything: gangsta street talk; academic posturing, both British and American; down-home black Floridian straight talk; and sassy, profane kids, both black and white.

Howard Belsey is a middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington, a thinly disguised version of one of the Ivies. He is a Rembrandt scholar who can't finish his book and a recent adulterer whose marriage is now on the slippery slope to disaster. His wife, Kiki, a black Floridian, is a warm, generous, competent wife, mother, and medical worker. Their children are Jerome, disgusted by his father's behavior, Zora, Wellington sophomore firebrand feminist and Levi, eager to be taken for a "homey," complete with baggy pants, hoodies and the ever-present iPod. This family has no secrets--at least not for long. They talk about everything, appropriate to the occasion or not. And, there is plenty to talk about.

The other half of the story is that of the Kipps family: Monty, stiff, wealthy ultra-conservative vocal Christian and Rembrandt scholar, whose book has been published. His wife Carlene is always slightly out of focus, and that's the way she wants it. She wafts over all proceedings, never really connecting with anyone. That seems to be endemic in the Kipps household. Son Michael is a bit of a Monty clone and daughter Victoria is not at all what Daddy thinks she is. Indeed, Forster's advice, "Only connect," is lost on this group.

The two academics have long been rivals, detesting each other's politics and disagreeing about Rembrandt. They are thrown into further conflict when Jerome leaves Wellington to get away from the discovery of his father's affair, lands on the Kipps' doorstep, falls for Victoria and mistakes what he has going with her for love. Howard makes it worse by trying to fix it. Then, Kipps is granted a visiting professorship at Wellington and the whole family arrives in Massachusetts.

From this raw material, Smith has fashioned a superb book, her best to date. She has interwoven class, race, and gender and taken everyone prisoner. Her even-handed renditions of liberal and/or conservative mouthings are insightful, often hilarious, and damning to all. She has a great time exposing everyone's clay feet. This author is a young woman cynical beyond her years, and we are all richer for it. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This is a superb novel, a many-cultured Middlemarch, but it's a rough one for an actor. James juggles a large cast of Brits and Yanks, middle- and working-class white, African-American, West Indian and African men and women, as well as street teens, wannabe street teens and don't-wannabe street teens. James has a beautiful, deep voice that at first seems antithetical to Smith's ship of fools, but he enhances the humor and pathos with vocal understatement. He helps give characters their rightful place in the saga. The parade of characters swirl around two antagonistic Rembrandt scholars in a Massachusetts college town. Howard Belsey is a self-absorbed, working-class British white man married to African-American Kiki and father to three cafe-au-lait children. Monty Kipps is a West Indian stuffed-shirt married to the generous Carlene, with a gorgeous daughter, Veronica. The book is funny and infuriating, crammed with multiple shades of love and lust, midlife and teenlife crises. Class, race and political conflicts are generally an integral part of a story that occasionally strays from its center. The theme of beauty as counterpoint to individual, family, cultural and social foibles and failures ribbons through the novel and wraps it up, perhaps to say that Beauty is, finally, the only Truth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–A hilarious comedy of manners in the tradition of Austen, Wharton, and Forster, to whom the author pays homage. She tackles class, race, and gender with acerbic wit and a wise eye for the complexities of modern life, in a 21st-century update of Howards End. Beauty opens as hapless art historian Howard Belsey, a transplanted Englishman married to an African-American woman, returns to London to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of his academic rival, Monty Kipps. Jerome has fallen in love not just with Victoria, but with the entire family, whose Trinidadian, right-wing roots are a sharp contrast to the freewheeling liberalism of his own family. In the meantime, Belseys other children, social activist Zora and Levi, who speaks only street slang and fancies himself from the hood, are each seeking the commitments and identities that will define their own lives. What results is a vivid portrait of marriage, family, the conflict between the political and the personal, and peoples eternal affinity for self-deception. Teens will enjoy this romp through the labyrinth of relationships that help a family mature and find its beautiful moments.–Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Not Great
This book has its moments-- bits of lovely writing, occasional insightful moments, some good laughs. It wasn't a page turner, but I'm not sorry I read it. The book also has a lot of problems, and they distract from the reading experience. The most noteable problem, is, as others have pointed out, the terrible and terribly overdone dialect. The southern graduate student's speech is ridiculous and laughable. Levi's is as well-- and I'm giving smith credit here by assuming it was supposed to be bad dialect, a middle class black american kid emulating slang, but it fails to accurately capture that. Levi speaks like no person in the history of ever, and would be laughed out of his house AND off of any street corner. Moreover, the characters never really come to life-- and this was a book about types I recognized and wanted to like. The Belsey's feel like walking lessons, and fall into cliche. Their feelings are never clear unless they're explicity telling you why they are the way they are. For a while, the sweeping tone of the book and frequent point of view shifts distract from this, but eventually you want a character to hold onto, and there isn't one. The Kipps' are even worse, seeming to exist solely as foils for the Belsey's. Their conservatism and Christianity are so shallow and underutilized from the begining that the subsequent exposure of hypocrisy doesn't pack any sort of punch. No one feels fully imagined. Characters can state a worldview or a self perception, but when all of the characters have to explicitly announce their politics and purposes all the time, it's a problem. More problematically, the pivotal scene of the book isn't really written. It's as if Smith got to the book's climax, realized it was already at least a hundred pages too long, and rushed the ending. Kiki's deciscion never feels real, and the final scene seems to indicate that there's been a good deal of forgiveness on the part of the children, something that seems unlikely.

I'm not sure that this book would be great even with better editing and dialogue. I think we've gotten to the point in literature where we pat an author on the back for even bothering with the "big questions." This book isn't really telling us anything new, and it seems confused about what it wants its reader to take away. Ok, beauty standards are varied, and in one way or another dominate women's lives. Pretty girls have problems because they're too pretty and ugly girls have problems because they're not pretty enough. OK... and? It's amazing that in a book about appearances, we never know what anyone looks like, aside from basic physical shape. What does Zora look like, beides big? Why is it that Kiki still gets hit on in black neighborhoods, even with the extra weight, but Zora is invisible to the opposite sex? What does it mean that Victoria isn't just a pretty girl, she's a pretty, dark-skinned black girl in a world where that's still often seen as a rarity or contradiction? Is her sexuality a rebellion against her family,and if so why does she side with them in key deciscions? Race creates identity issues, especially when mixed with class issues... and? This books doesn't tell us anything new about middle class kids trying to pass themselves off as poor, or interracial families having racial tension. It's not enough to have provocative material, or to have big issues-- you've still got to do something with them, and this book really doesn't.

Stunned That This Made The Booker Shortlist
In many ways, On Beauty is similar to White Teeth. It's laugh-out-loud funny and contains marvelous descriptive passages. In the end, however, the similarities the novel bears to White Teeth work against it. Reading On Beauty, I got the feeling that I'd already experienced much of what unfolds. And I had--in White Teeth. For example, a character named Jerome falls in love with another family in the same vein in which Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal fall in love with the Chalfens. Zora, by the way, seems nothing more than a smarter version of Irie. Also, Smith describes the beauty of Zora's love interest, Carl, in the same manner she describes Millat's beauty. And, as in White Teeth, On Beauty's religious characters prove themselves hypocritical. But the similarities don't end there. In, On Beauty, Smith even borrows a line she devoted several paragraphs to in White Teeth--"What you looking at?" While Smith's commentary surrounding this question is hilarious in White Teeth, it should have been left out of On Beauty.
The novel's similarity to White Teeth does not ruin it. Its many flaws do, though.
The dialogue is disastrous. At one point Roxbury resident Carl asks Zora, "Am I meant to be grateful?" This is a British phrasing. An American would say, "Am I supposed to be grateful?"
Smith particularly fails at her attempt to incorporate Black English Vernacular into the text. Sometimes she nails it, as is the case when a character named Levi asks, "Where they at?" Other times, she stumbles, such as when Levi asks, "Who you on the phone to?" "Who you talking to?" or "Who you on the phone with?" should have been used instead. Also, an abundance of black characters say "I be." This wouldn't sound strange coming from an old black Southerner, perhaps, but, coming from young blacks, it does. Even uneducated young black urbanites speak a more standard form of English than this. Even the blacks on UPN shows speak a more standard form of English than this. Then there's Kiki, a middle-aged black woman with Florida roots, who speaks consistently inconsistently. At the beginning of the book, she tells her husband, Howard, "Your life is just an orgy of deprivation." But later she remarks that the sun "done set." It's unlikely that the same speaker would have birthed both lines. I was similarly startled when Carl, an uneducated rapper, who utters sentences such as, "I be a college a man now," has no difficulty writing lengthy papers for the music department of upper-crust Wellington College.
Often, the black American characters are stereotypes. All of the women have large breasts and backsides and use the words "baby" and "honey" gratuitously. At one point we meet LaShonda, a young woman who calls Levi "baby" a half-dozen times in the span of two pages. Of course a girl with a "ghetto" name such as LaShonda must not only have a "big old booty," she must also be an unwed mother of three on the prowl for a new baby daddy. It's also apparent that Smith believes all black Americans refer to each other as "brother" or "sister." Maybe during the Black Power Movement. Not in 2005.
Kiki's weight is also problematic. While Howard cites Kiki's 250-pound frame, in part, for his adultery, black urban men won't stop hitting on her. Shapeliness is said to be valued in black culture, yes, but 250 pounds is not shapeliness, it's morbid obesity. Reading On Beauty I am puzzled as to why celebs such as Star Jones and Oprah Winfrey weren't sex symbols in the black community when they were at their heaviest. There's also the fact that there are no consequences for Kiki's weight gain. In real life, middle-aged, overweight black women suffer from hypertension, diabetes, joint-pain, back pain, etc. Kiki, on the other hand, does yoga.
The novel includes other inaccuracies about black Americans. At one point, Kiki says, "We got black kids dying on the front line..., and they're in that army 'cos they think college has got nothing to offer them." Actually, the military's promise to pay college tuition is the main reason young people of all races, blacks included, enlist.
Smith's description of Kiki's and Carl's palms is also wrong. The two are described as having rich-brown palms. Blacks, even dark-skinned ones, have palms that fall into the pinkish-beige range. Smith makes the opposite mistake when describing Kiki's areolas, which she describes as pinkish brown. In fact, a dark-skinned black woman would have dark brown areolas.
While not all of what Smith writes is wrong, it isn't necessarily good. She uses an abundance of adverbs and adjectives, many repeatedly. How often can someone be called fatuous? There are also redundancies such as, "He nodded mutely" and non sequiturs such as, "Kiki restrained herself. Instead she opened her purse and began searching through it for her lip-gloss." Huh? Instead of what?
Character development is also lacking. Choo, the main Haitian character, is nothing more than Smith's mouthpiece. His sole purpose is to inform the reader about Haiti's plight. Then there's Victoria Kipps. Worshipped for her beauty, Kipps turns out to be a walking cliche. She may be stunning, but, guess what, she's dumb! She may be promiscuous, but, guess what, she's easy because sex is all men want from her. Sigh. Katherine Armstrong, a character who makes an inexplicable cameo (as does Helen Keller), is eerily similar to Lee Fiora, the protagonist of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel, Prep. Like Lee, Katie is from South Bend, Ind. There, she was the brightest kid in town. But, surrounded by New England preppies at Wellington, Katie is overwhelmed and, thus, painfully shy. Ring any bells? It's also problematic that Smith features other minor characters such as Doc Brown, her rapper-brother's stage name in real life. This choice uproots readers from the fictional world and places them into the real one. The same thing happens when the reader encounters a poem written by Smith's husband mid-novel. The rap lyrics and poetry used in the novel should reflect the characters who authored them. How can this occur if Smith gives fictional characters credit for verse composed by real people? This move also led Smith to make another mistake. When Carl recites the lyrics of Smith's real-life brother, he refers to Mc Donald's as Macca D's. No one in the States calls McDonald's Macca D's. Amercians say Mickey D's.
In closing, read On Beauty if you're a Zadie Smith fan or if you'd like to see how she tweaked Howard's End. Don't read it because you've heard it's a good book. At best, it's mediocre. I give it two-and-a-half stars.

Wasted Talent
I just finished reading "On Beauty" after several friends recommended "White Teeth" and I found Smith to be an enormously talented writer who does not humanize her characters. It is hard to say that she does not flesh them out, we do hear their voices but we cannot relate to them except as objects of Smith's satire. There is nothing wrong with writing a purely satirical work but she is trying for something more here and it does not work. After introducing her characters we are ready to enjoy their humor, their failures, their triumphs and eventually their redemptions but, alas, the book ends on a note of cheap revenge that is decidedly unpleasant. She makes some attempts to honor these characters but Smith's basic cynicism does not allow her to do so. I believe Smith believes she is transcending stereotypes by portraying a mixed race marriage and young black intellectuals. Why is it then that Howard, a white, working class man ultimately fails in his dream career and as a family man, that a beautiful, smart black student is portrayed as a sexual predator destroying lives around her. Did Smith so hate her time in America that she has her character Victoria destroy so many lives from the minute she lands here? And on and on with each character whether black or white. One wants to like these characters but she just wont let us. Two scenes I did think were brilliant - the way Claire, the teacher of poetry interacts with her students especially during their evening at The Bus Stop, and the department head making introductory remarks at a faculty meeting with a one line cameo appearance by Smith herself.
Ultimately, this is a mean book with mean characters that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. I would have given it one star only that Zadie Smith is a brilliant writer. I would say to her "channel your anger, give us believable characters that we can care about". Zadie Smith needs to grow up.