A Multi-Cultural Campus Novel
Jan. 11th, 2007 08:35 pmDec 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.
( Read more... )
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.
( Read more... )