On Beauty
By Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton
***

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

On Beauty is a hommage to E. M. Forster, acknowledges Zadie Smith. Citing him as the writer “to whom all my fiction is indebted”, she sets about earnestly updating his 1910 novel, Howard’s End. The opening line, “One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father”, is a revamp of the offhand “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister” that opened the Forster classic. The novel revolves around two families with contrary worldviews. Howard Belsey, a white Englishman teaching in Boston, and his African-American wife, Kiki, are liberals, a la the Schlegels in Howards End. They have three children: earnest Jerome, ambitious Zora, and a wannabe black brother, Levi. In the rival camp, representing the material Wilcoxes of Howards End, is Sir Montague Kipps, a right wing Rembrandt scholar in London, who believes affirmative action is a “demoralizing philosophy”.

The two camps collide when Monty Kipps’ beautiful, capricious daughter, Victoria, has a short affair with Jerome. Further, Monty arrives at Howard Belsey’s college for a teaching assignment and takes a direct swipe by planning a lecture series titled, “Taking the Liberal out of Liberal Arts”. Meanwhile, Carlene Kipps strikes up a friendship with Kiki, who has been deeply unsettled by Howard’s extra marital affair after thirty years of marriage. When Carlene abruptly dies, her legacy to Kiki shakes the Kipps family.

Various incidents from Howards End are sewn into the story as it progresses: a mix-up over an umbrella/here Discman, a Christmas shopping trip, an abruptly terminated trip to the country, an expensive bequest, even a Concert – in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony Forster heard elephants, Smith hears apes in Mozart’s Requeim. For a Forsterite, the recycling is apparent. To the reader unfamiliar with Howards End, the happenings of On Beauty will confound as he ponders where the story is headed as the plight of Haitian refugees gains prominence, Campus politics creeps in, Howard lurches from one affair into another, paintings are debated…

Zadie Smith is a fine writer with a brilliant ear for dialogue and a flair for characterisation – qualities that made her an instant literary star with her debut novel, White Teeth, in 2000. Levi, as a teenager from an intellectual background trying to assimilate into the street culture of deprived Blacks, is effectively limned. Kiki, whose “leg weighs more than … the leprechaun” of Howard’s affair, with her warmth and spontaneity, shines amidst the cold academics. Smith also has a talent for the unexpected. Here she delivers a spunky reversal of racial stereotyping: a white liberal, a black conservative. Alas, the recycling takes centre stage, and the plot becomes octopod.

The “engine” of the story does not turn until it is halfway through; surely belabouring every guest at an anniversary party is unnecessary. Smith slips up occasionally by switching a point of view mid-paragraph or forgetting what she had written earlier – Howard’s mistress finds him “a man for whom she had no sexual desire whatsoever”, yet she gets caught feeling him up at the party. The excessive italicisation is amateurish.

Is On Beauty a contemporary retelling of an Edwardian masterpiece, or a clever makeup of an unoriginal story – only time will tell. As E. M. Forster himself said, "The final test for a novel will be our affection for it…”