On Beauty (& many other things)

Without knowing much about the setting of On Beauty by Zadie Smith, I began reading it around the same time that I read Happens Every Day by Isabel Gillies. The settings are very similar - both take place in small town liberal arts colleges; much of the main action of both books has to do with the infidelity of the husband/father. Beyond this, the books are not especially similar, but I may be doomed to think of the two as a pair based on the coincidence that I just described. The main difference between the two books was that I thought On Beauty was interesting, clever and enjoyable.

Even though Smith does talk a great deal about beauty in this novel, it could just as easily be called, On Race, On Class or On Marriage. Or any number of other titles. The Belsey family is made up of the parents and three children. Howard is the father, a professor of art history who originally comes from England. The mother, Kiki is a black woman from Atlanta who works at a local hospital. Jerome is the oldest son - the only Christian in a family of atheists. The daughter Zora is determined to be successful intellectually, but ends up being overbearing and commandeering more often than not. The youngest son, Levi, spends most of the novel trying to figure out what it means to be black in a small town with a very small black community.

I spend so much time explaining the unique positions of each of the family members, because I think the fact that their situations are so dramatically different is what makes the novel interesting. As mentioned before, the father's infidelity is crucial to the plot, as is the arrival of one of his professional rivals on the college campus, but, in my opinion, these events really just serve to illustrate the way that honesty, love and loyalty work in this culturally, emotionally, spiritually diverse family.

I'm very interested in novelists who don't seem to be concerned with whether or not their main characters are likable. Even though I haven't heard or read anything that describes Smith's own feelings on this subject, if I had to guess, I would say that she is more interested in making her characters realistic and believable. This doesn't necessarily mean that the characters aren't likable, just that they frequently do things that make the reader cringe. I consider it a mark of success on the part of the storyteller when I feel genuinely embarrassed for her characters.

Luckily, the book is fiction, so no matter what happens on the page, I can remind myself that these people didn't actually have to suffer these humiliations & heartbreaks. And if they survive, then us real folk probably can too.