Excerpt from On Beauty by Zadie Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

A few minutes later, with the door closed behind her children, Kiki turned to her husband with a thesis for a face, of which only Howard could know every line and reference. Just for the hell of it Howard smiled. In return he received nothing at all. Howard stopped smiling. If there was going to be a fight, no fool would bet on him. Kiki – whom Howard had once, twenty-eight years ago, thrown over his shoulder like a light roll of carpet, to be laid down, and laid upon, in their first house for the first time – was nowadays a solid two hundred and fifty pounds, and looked twenty years his junior. Her skin had that famous ethnic advantage of not wrinkling much, but, in Kiki’s case the weight gain had stretched it even more impressively. At fifty-two, her face was still a girl’s face. A beautiful tough-girl’s face.

Now she crossed the room and pushed by him with such force that he was muscled into an adjacent rocking chair. Back at the kitchen table, she began violently to pack a bag with things she did not need to take to work. She spoke without looking at him. ‘You know what’s weird? Is that you can get someone who is a professor of one thing and then is just so intensely stupid about everything else? Consult the ABC of parenting, Howie. You’ll find that if you go about it this way, then the exact, but the exact opposite, of what you want to happen will happen. The i>exact opposite.’

‘But the exact opposite of what I want,’ considered Howard, rocking in his chair, ‘is what always fucking happens.’

Kiki stopped what she was doing. ‘Right. Because you never get what you want. Your life is just an orgy of deprivation.’ This nodded at the recent trouble. It was an offer to kick open a door in the mansion of their marriage leading on to an antechamber of misery. The offer was declined. Kiki instead began that familiar puzzle of getting her small knapsack to sit in the middle of her giant back.

Howard stood up and rearranged himself decently in his bathrobe. ‘Do we have their address at least?’ he asked. ‘Home address?’

Kiki pressed her fingers to each temple like a carnival mindreader. She spoke slowly, and, though the pose was sarcastic, her eyes were wet.

‘I want to understand what it is you think we’ve done to you. Your family. What is it we’ve done? Have we deprived you of something?’

Howard sighed and looked away. ‘I’m giving a paper in Cambridge on Tuesday anyway – I might as well fly to London a day earlier, if only to – ’

Kiki slapped the table. ‘Oh, God, this isn’t hapening – Jerome can marry who the hell he wants to marry – or are we going to start making up visiting cards and asking him to meet only the daughters of academics that you happen to – ’

‘Might the address be in the green moleskin?’ Now she blinked away the possibility of tears. ‘I don’t know where the address might be,’ she said, impersonating his accent. ‘Find it yourself. Maybe it’s hidden underneath the crap in that damn hovel of yours.’

‘Thanks so much,’ said Howard and began his return journey up the stairs to his study.

Excerpted from On Beauty, (c) 2005 Zadie Smith. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Press. All rights reserved.