Two families, the Belseys and the Kipps, live beautiful lives. Don't they?
Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore.
Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?
Set on both sides of the Atlantic, Zadie Smith's third novel is a brilliant analysis of family life, the institution of marriage, intersections of the personal and political, and an honest look at people's deceptions. It is also, as you might expect, very funny indeed.
What a wise and wonderful novel On Beauty is. On opening it I wondered what possible interest I could find in reading a novel of middle-class angst set in a liberal arts college, but how wrong I was. Smith deliciously skewers the insularities and hypocrisies of academia while exploring family, race and morality... (Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The New York TImes - Michiko Kakutani On Beauty opens out to provide the reader with a splashy, irreverent look at campus politics, political correctness and the ways different generations regard race and class, but its real focus is on personal relationships. Like Forster, Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane.
Library Journal
The characters are too strained and generally unsympathetic to engage one in their troubles or dreams. Yet Smith's descriptions of some of the personas, particularly the opposing matriarchs and their younger children, suggest a looser story that could have been a lot more fun.
Kirkus Reviews
In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone.
Booklist
Intermingled with the analysis of family and marriage are commentaries on affirmative action, liberal versus conservative, and prejudices in many forms. This is a boisterous, funny, poignant, and erudite novel that should firmly establish Smith as a literary force of nature.
Bookmarks
[Smith's] wonderful ear for dialogue, as well as her uncanny ability to inhabit characters from different walks of life, is truly extraordinary.
Publishers Weekly
This is a superb novel....The book is funny and infuriating, crammed with multiple shades of love and lust, midlife and teenlife crises.
The Guardian (UK) - Stephanie Merritt
Zadie Smith's homage to EM Forster, On Beauty, confirms her as a writer of remarkable wit and originality.
The Times - Helen Dunmore
Zadie Smith believes that she is not going to be a great novelist — and God knows very few are — then she is certainly an intuitive, incisive and creative critic of the great novel that is Howards End.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by tatoutheangel About On Beauty... I highly recommend to read the novel though there are boring parts.
Many people will identify themselves with the characters of the novel.
Zadie Smith tried to tackle many interesting issues in the novel. She didn't focus exclusively on... Read More
Rated of 5
by mjc It was ok This book was ok, it was a bit boring, but yet I wanted to read on. After I finished I thought I wouldn't recommend it, but now that I think about it, and realize that there was a fair bit good content considering it was about a prof and his... Read More
On Beauty is a tribute to E. M. Forster's Howards End, but set in
a contemporary American setting. The Belseys (like Forster's Schlegels)
become entangled with another family whose conventional household appears to be
the opposite of their own but across the divide the wives form a friendship that
leads to a valuable legacy being bequeathed by one woman to the other, leading
to concealment and conflict.
Edward Morgan Forster was born in 1879 in London and educated at
Cambridge. While at Cambridge he became a member of a group called the
Apostles (formerly the Cambridge Conversazione Society) who discussed moral,
intellectual and aesthetic issues. Many of this group, including Forster,
later congregated in London where they became known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Forster's books, including Howards End (1910) explore class, nationality,
economic status, and the effect of each of these elements on personal
relationships. Although he lived until 1970 he wrote little fiction
after...
From Tatiana de Rosnay, author of the New York Times bestseller Sarah's Key, A Secret Kept plumbs the depths of complex family relationships and the power of a past secret to change everything in the present.
These are 2 of the 8 readalike suggestions for On Beauty. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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