A Multi-Cultural Campus Novel
Jan. 11th, 2007 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselDec 2006
On Beauty - Zadie Smith - Penguin, 2005
* * *
Well, if I were David Lodge, I would sue. In On Beauty, Zadie Smith has taken his standard novelistic set-up - a university milieu that is a thinly disguised fictionalisation of a real place, two academics who represent the opposite poles of a contemporary debate (atheistic politically-correct liberalism vs right-wing meritocratic individualism), various inappropriate love affairs and some dramatic revelations - and given it her own multi-cultural spin. The result is a more assured and better plotted book than her first, White Teeth, but also a rather less interesting one.
There are, of course, a number of differences from the David Lodge template. It is set in Wellington, a sleepy New England town close to Boston which is obviously modelled on Harvard. There is a much richer mix of ethnic identities - one of the battling academics, Howard Belsey, has a mixed marriage with the African-American Kiki (strongly reminiscent of that of the Jones family in White Teeth), while the other, Montague Kipps, is Anglo-Caribbean, and there is a full supporting cast of Haitians, hip-hop artists, Hispanics and others. Unlike Lodge, Smith only chooses to focus on only one side of the intellectual polarity that she has set up, with the chief viewpoint characters being Howard and his family. The guilt-ridden catholicism (and therefore a lot of the laughs) of a Lodge novel are also missing - Howard’s eldest son Jerome is a Christian, much to the annoyance of his atheistic father, but he is kept off-stage for the majority of the novel and the promising altercation between them in the early pages never has a chance to develop.
Other than Howard and Kiki, the main viewpoint characters are their other two children: Zora, a forceful student who believes passionately in the liberal agenda, and Levi, a charming but naive teenager who desperately wants to be “street” despite his middle-class upbringing. The plot is too disparate to summarise adequately but is chiefly concerned with the difficult relationship between Howard and Kiki resulting from an affair that Howard has had with a colleague. Tensions are increased when Montague Kipps, who like Howard is an expert on Rembrandt and therefore a bitter intellectual rival, moves to Wellington to take up a teaching position and Kiki strikes up a friendship with his enigmatic wife Carlene, thereby subtly betraying her husband. Montague's beautiful but wayward daughter Victoria, who had a short-lived but passionate affair with Jerome when he was studying in England, adds to the complications when she comes to study at Wellington.
Smith's style is toned down compared with the Dickensian verve of White Teeth but is still full of delightful observations. The one that made me smile most was “It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with anyone she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.” The parody of the meaningless abstractions of post-modern critic-speak is also hilarious and spot-on, as exemplified by Howard’s class as seen from the point of view of a sixteen year-old called Katie:
‘What we’re trying to interrogate here,’ he says, ‘is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human. What is is about these texts - these images of narration - that is implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius?’
An awful long silence follows this. Katie bites the skin around her cuticles.
(p 252)
As well she might. Victoria neatly sums up the problem with such abstractions later in the novel, where she describes to Howard the Wellington students’ habit of characterising their lecturers with reference to tomatoes - “to properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory” for a feminist, “there is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself” for a philosopher and so on. Howard’s class “is all about never ever saying that I like the tomato. Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people for totally selfish reasons of their own have attached cultural - I should say nutritional - weight to”.
Sadly that’s about all that Smith has to say on the subject of beauty, which makes this another of those mainstream literary novels where the title doesn’t really mean anything. I had other problems with the book as well. Howard’s character is annoyingly inconsistent - he veers from being opinionated and forthright in some scenes to vague, woolly and incoherent in others. We see him doing some extremely stupid things with no self-justificatory thoughts crossing his mind, which simply isn’t plausible for an intellectual.
The focus on the Belseys, none of whom is entirely likeable, also has the ironic effect of making the certainties of Montague Kipps seem much more attractive, which I cannot believe was Smith’s intention. It’s all very well to say that politically-correct liberalism, with its constant muddy balancing of competing rights, has its problems - no thinking person could possibly deny that - but it’s important to show why cultural conservatism, and the tribalism it leads to, doesn’t have the answers either. By not talking about it there is the danger that it will seem more attractive and plausible than it actually is. Kipps does eventually get his comeuppance but the manner in which it is done feels tacked on.
So a book which suffers from a similar thematic incoherence to White Teeth but lacks the latter’s stylistic exuberance. Which makes it all the more puzzling why it has done so well in the awards (it won the Orange prize and was shortlisted for the Booker). Part of the problem is, I think, the New England setting, which is bland compared to the salty realities of London - the book picks up noticeably in the brief sections which are set in England, and I hope that in her next book Smith will return to her native haunts.
One other thing to mention for those who are better-read than me: according to one review, the book is also a homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End and shares many similarities in the plotting. Those who have read the latter may well find that there is more to it than the enjoyable but incoherent multi-cultural campus novel that it seemed to be to me.
On Beauty - Zadie Smith - Penguin, 2005
* * *
Well, if I were David Lodge, I would sue. In On Beauty, Zadie Smith has taken his standard novelistic set-up - a university milieu that is a thinly disguised fictionalisation of a real place, two academics who represent the opposite poles of a contemporary debate (atheistic politically-correct liberalism vs right-wing meritocratic individualism), various inappropriate love affairs and some dramatic revelations - and given it her own multi-cultural spin. The result is a more assured and better plotted book than her first, White Teeth, but also a rather less interesting one.
There are, of course, a number of differences from the David Lodge template. It is set in Wellington, a sleepy New England town close to Boston which is obviously modelled on Harvard. There is a much richer mix of ethnic identities - one of the battling academics, Howard Belsey, has a mixed marriage with the African-American Kiki (strongly reminiscent of that of the Jones family in White Teeth), while the other, Montague Kipps, is Anglo-Caribbean, and there is a full supporting cast of Haitians, hip-hop artists, Hispanics and others. Unlike Lodge, Smith only chooses to focus on only one side of the intellectual polarity that she has set up, with the chief viewpoint characters being Howard and his family. The guilt-ridden catholicism (and therefore a lot of the laughs) of a Lodge novel are also missing - Howard’s eldest son Jerome is a Christian, much to the annoyance of his atheistic father, but he is kept off-stage for the majority of the novel and the promising altercation between them in the early pages never has a chance to develop.
Other than Howard and Kiki, the main viewpoint characters are their other two children: Zora, a forceful student who believes passionately in the liberal agenda, and Levi, a charming but naive teenager who desperately wants to be “street” despite his middle-class upbringing. The plot is too disparate to summarise adequately but is chiefly concerned with the difficult relationship between Howard and Kiki resulting from an affair that Howard has had with a colleague. Tensions are increased when Montague Kipps, who like Howard is an expert on Rembrandt and therefore a bitter intellectual rival, moves to Wellington to take up a teaching position and Kiki strikes up a friendship with his enigmatic wife Carlene, thereby subtly betraying her husband. Montague's beautiful but wayward daughter Victoria, who had a short-lived but passionate affair with Jerome when he was studying in England, adds to the complications when she comes to study at Wellington.
Smith's style is toned down compared with the Dickensian verve of White Teeth but is still full of delightful observations. The one that made me smile most was “It was an ailment Zora inherited from her father: when confronted with anyone she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.” The parody of the meaningless abstractions of post-modern critic-speak is also hilarious and spot-on, as exemplified by Howard’s class as seen from the point of view of a sixteen year-old called Katie:
‘What we’re trying to interrogate here,’ he says, ‘is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human. What is is about these texts - these images of narration - that is implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius?’
An awful long silence follows this. Katie bites the skin around her cuticles.
(p 252)
As well she might. Victoria neatly sums up the problem with such abstractions later in the novel, where she describes to Howard the Wellington students’ habit of characterising their lecturers with reference to tomatoes - “to properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato’s suppressed Herstory” for a feminist, “there is no way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself” for a philosopher and so on. Howard’s class “is all about never ever saying that I like the tomato. Your tomatoes have got nothing to do with love or truth. They’re not fallacies. They’re just these pretty pointless tomatoes that people for totally selfish reasons of their own have attached cultural - I should say nutritional - weight to”.
Sadly that’s about all that Smith has to say on the subject of beauty, which makes this another of those mainstream literary novels where the title doesn’t really mean anything. I had other problems with the book as well. Howard’s character is annoyingly inconsistent - he veers from being opinionated and forthright in some scenes to vague, woolly and incoherent in others. We see him doing some extremely stupid things with no self-justificatory thoughts crossing his mind, which simply isn’t plausible for an intellectual.
The focus on the Belseys, none of whom is entirely likeable, also has the ironic effect of making the certainties of Montague Kipps seem much more attractive, which I cannot believe was Smith’s intention. It’s all very well to say that politically-correct liberalism, with its constant muddy balancing of competing rights, has its problems - no thinking person could possibly deny that - but it’s important to show why cultural conservatism, and the tribalism it leads to, doesn’t have the answers either. By not talking about it there is the danger that it will seem more attractive and plausible than it actually is. Kipps does eventually get his comeuppance but the manner in which it is done feels tacked on.
So a book which suffers from a similar thematic incoherence to White Teeth but lacks the latter’s stylistic exuberance. Which makes it all the more puzzling why it has done so well in the awards (it won the Orange prize and was shortlisted for the Booker). Part of the problem is, I think, the New England setting, which is bland compared to the salty realities of London - the book picks up noticeably in the brief sections which are set in England, and I hope that in her next book Smith will return to her native haunts.
One other thing to mention for those who are better-read than me: according to one review, the book is also a homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End and shares many similarities in the plotting. Those who have read the latter may well find that there is more to it than the enjoyable but incoherent multi-cultural campus novel that it seemed to be to me.