On Beauty

Zadie Smith

Howard and Kiki Belsey live in a suburb of Boston where Howard is a college professor. They have three kids, two in college and one younger. Howard teaches a course about art appreciation, or it might be better to say art unappreciation, as he strives to strip the romance and symbolic meanings that have been traditionally attached to our perceptions of art. He especially likes to go after Rembrandt, pointing out that Rembrandt was just a guy trying to earn a living painting what his wealthy patrons wanted him to paint and that's all.
Howard and his wife are liberals, believing all the usual liberal tenets. Their son Jerome is a born-again Christian, much to Howard's dismay. Howard's enemy and nemesis is Sir Monty Kipps, a conservative Christian who despises liberal doctrines and whose mission is to take the "liberal out of liberal arts".
Howard's oldest child, Jerome, briefly worked for Monty and had a short affair with Monty's beautiful and wayward daughter, Vee. The news that Monty and family are moving to the Belsey's hometown and that Monty will be lecturing at Howard's college doesn't make anyone in the Belsey family happy, especially Howard. To Howard, Monty stands for everything that Howard despises, and vice versa.
To complicate things, Howard and Kiki are going through a rough patch in their marriage due to Howard's infidelity. Theirs is a mixed marriage, Kiki is African American and Howard is white and from England. Their youngest son, Levi, is suffering from an identity crisis and trying to identify himself with the hip-hop street culture of which he really has no experience, being a child of privilege. He ends up hanging around with a gang of Haitian refugees and, in his efforts to ingratiate himself with them, gets into trouble. And Kiki starts a friendship with the enemy when she discovers that she really likes Monty's wife Carlene despite their differences.
Howard's and Kiki's daughter, Zora, who goes to the same college her dad teaches at, becomes enamored of a young street poet, Carl, and comes into conflict with Monty's daughter Vee over this handsome young rapper. Howard also finds himself entangled with Vee and trying to conceal it from his wife. Meanwhile, Howard and Monty are engaged in a power struggle at the college.
Everyone in the Belsey family ends up feeling betrayed. Howard feels betrayed by his wife's tolerance and friendship for the Kippses. Kiki feels betrayed by Howard's continuing infidelity. Jerome feels betrayed by Howard's relationship with Vee. Zora feels betrayed by Carl's relationship with Vee. And Levi feels betrayed by his parents, who are not poor and not street and don't understand, he thinks, what it means to be Haitian.

This is a very interesting and often amusing book about a modern college family, a family of mixed race and mixed culture with an intellectual father and a non-intellectual mother and three kids who are like them and yet different. Lots is going on in this story and it was rather sad watching Howard destroy his marriage. I kept hoping Howard and Kiki would work it out, but how can they when Howard keeps cheating on his wife, a woman he claims to love. Kiki tries to keep it together but finally admits that her marriage has run its course and that she has had enough of Howard Belsey. I do wish Murdoch had played a larger part in the story, I really enjoyed reading about Kiki's little dog. This was a good story about a family and a failing marriage.

On a side note, I was reading Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov at the same time as I was reading On Beauty and, in a strange coincidence, Lolita is mentioned in the book:

"She jumped off the bed and into his lap. His erection was blatant, but first she coolly drank the rest of his wine, pressing down on him as Lolita did on Humbert, as if he were just a chair she happened to sit on. No doubt she had read Lolita.

New Words

Gnomically: in a gnomic manner -- mysterious and often incomprehensible yet seemingly wise. "'It's just what it is,' he said gnomically."

Pulvinate: cushion, cushion-shape, flattened pads or pad-like. "Their pulvinate bellies were red satin, and it was here that the needles pierced."

Crepitations: clicking, rattling, or crackling noises. "The Boston primness Howard associated with these kind of events [concerts] could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments -- and all this was to the good."

Cernuous: having branches or flower heads that bend downward; drooping. "Walking up Redwood Avenue with its tunnel of cernuous willows, Levi found he had lost the will even to nod his head, usually an involuntary habit with him when music was playing."

Vol-au-vent: a small canapé - circular pieces of puff pastry with a small hole which accommodates various fillings. "'You know, I wasn't really in the mood to stuff three hundred tiny little vol-au-vent cases with crab paste,' she said, following her brother through the open front door."

Decline: in certain languages, to give the inflected forms of a noun, pronoun or adjective. "'You can decline a Latin noun, but apparently you can't even --'"

Aperçus: discerning perceptions; insights (plural form of aperçu). "He segued into Aristotle's praise of friendship, and from there to some aperçus of his own."

Lido: a public outdoor swimming pool and surrounding facilities, or part of a beach where people can swim, lie in the sun or participate in water sports. "A sprawling North London parkland, composed of oaks, willows and chestnuts, yews and sycamores, the beech and the birch; that encompasses the city's highest point and spreads far beyond it; that is so well planted it feels unplanned; that is not the country but is no more a garden than Yellowstone; that has a shade of green for every possible felicitation of light; that paints itself in russets and ambers in the autumn, canary-yellow in the splashy spring; with tickling bush grass to hide teenage lovers and joint smokers, broad oaks for brave men to kiss against, mown meadows for summer ball games, hills for kites, ponds for hippies, an icy lido for old men with strong constitutions, mean llamas for mean children and, for the tourists, a country house, its façade painted white enough for any Hollywood close-up, complete with a tea room, although anything you buy from there should be eaten outside with the grass beneath your toes, sitting under the magnolia tree, letting the white upturned bells of blossoms, blush-pink at their tips, fall all around you."

Windrush: As a result of the losses during World War II, the British government began encouraging mass immigration for the first time in order to fill shortages in the labor market. This included Poles and Italians from Europe, however to provide the numbers required the government turned to the countries of the empire and commonwealth countries. Many West Indians were attracted by better prospects in the United Kingdom. The ship Empire Windrush brought the first group of several hundred immigrants from Jamaica to Tilbury near London on June 22, 1948. The 492 passengers from Jamaica were the first large group of West Indian immigrants to the UK after the Second World War. "A few minutes later the children filed out again, feeling a degree more confused as to the true character of the person whose obituary was to appear in tomorrow morning's Times: Lady Kipps, loving wife of Sir Montague Kipps, devoted mother of Victoria and Michael, Windrush passenger, tireless church worker, patron of the arts."

Eglantine: sweetbrier; Eurasian rose with prickly stems and fragrant leaves and bright pink flowers. "Standing in the pebbled forecourt under the bare branches of a cherry tree, Howard could almost imagine the busy main road completely vanished and in its place paddocks, hedgerows and eglantine, cobbled lanes."

Concameration: an arch or vault. "Howard alone looked up into the simple concameration of the roof, hoping for escape or relief or distraction."

Flâneur: French for stroller; a person who strolls walks the city in order to experience it. "At this distance, walking past them all, thus itemizing them, not having to talk to any of them, flâneur Howard was able to love them and, more than this, to feel himself, in his own romantic fashion, to be one of them."

Halal: a halal butcher shop is one where the meat is prepared in accordance with Muslim ritual and laws. In Islam, halal is an Arabic term meaning lawful or permissible and not only encompasses food and drink, but all matters of daily life. "Whatever the fear or force that had thrust him from Carlene Kipps's funeral out on to these cold streets was what now compelled him to make this rare trip: down the Broadway, past the McDonalds's, past the halal butchers, second road on the left, to arrive here, at No. 46 with the thick glass panel in the door."

Dyad: any two entities regarded as some kind of unit; two units regarded as a pair or opposite in a whole. "'There are,' said Jack, bringing his hands together, 'a dyad of reasons why last month's meeting was delayed, rescheduled ... maybe in fact it would be more accurate to say repositioned, for this date, for January tenth, and I feel that before we can proceed with this meeting, to which, by the way, I warmly welcome you all after what I sincerely hope was a pleasurable -- and most importantly -- a restful Christmas break -- yes, and as I say, before we do proceed with what promises to be a really rather packed meeting as far as the printed agenda is concerned -- before starting I just wanted to speak briefly about the reasons for this repositioning, for it was, in itself, as many of you know, not entirely without controversy.'"

Mythemes: in the study of mythology, a mytheme is the essential kernel of a myth, an irreducible, unchanging element, one that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways or linked in more complicated relationships. "'And publications next year will include Dr J. M. Wilson's "Windmills of My Mind": Pursuing the Dream of Natural Energy Branvain Press, which is due for publication in May; Dr Stefan Guilleme's "Paint It Black: Adventures in Minimalist America, Yale University Press, in October; Borders and Intersections, or Dancing with Anansi: A Study in Caribbean Mythemes by Professor Erskine Jegede, published by our own Wellington Press this August ...'"