'On Beauty' takes on social ills

Zora Belsey may well live in your entryway. She's that pompous power-tool who dissects her readings clinically, later to drool semi-meaningful strings of words in precept. An academic worrywart, she takes social climbing as a serious extracurricular.

After she addresses a faculty meeting, fulfilling of one of her life's fantasies, she sends 34 follow-up emails to one of her professors within a fortnight. That professor, a well-known poet, doesn't want Zora in her poetry course and earlier in the year rejected Zora's application. Resourceful Zora was undeterred. Even if Zora's poems resemble "the kind that appear to have been generated by a random word-generating machine," she could construct the kind of argument that successfully pressured her way into the class. Zora Belsey is academia's version of a piece of work.

Zora Belsey is also a self-consciously overweight nineteen-year-old townie, a loyal daughter to a father who probably doesn't deserve it. But Zora's story is just one of many strands intertwined within a backdrop of campus rivalries, racial tension and familial dystopia.

Zadie Smith's new novel, "On Beauty," chronicles a year in the lives of the Belseys, a university family that is coming apart. Howard Belsey, Zora's professor father, has long been at work on his masterpiece, "Against Rembrandt: Interrogating a Master," and the interrogation never quite ends. But that's really the least of his worries. After Howard confesses to an affair, his relationship with his wife Kiki is alienated at best. Jerome, the eldest child, a dreamer-intellectual, reacts to the news of the infidelity with anger and secures a summer internship with Howard's professional nemesis. Zora, the middle child, takes the affair in stride on the surface, defending her father. Levi, the youngest at fifteen, remains aloof, escaping first to his job at a music chain and later to a world of hustling. The Belseys are a suffering lot.

Life isn't made any easier for them when Howard's archrival, Sir Montague Kipps, arrives on campus with his family. Kipps has come to Wellington, the fictitious and elite Massachusetts university of the Belseys, for a lectureship. The arrival is unfortunate, and not just for Howard. In one week of his summer internship, Jerome managed to fall in love with Kipps' painfully gorgeous daughter Vee (indeed, a swichewenche), who first entertains and later rejects Jerome's affections. As this is fiction, the families cannot merely ignore each other at Wellington, but must continue their lockstep dance. Kiki and Mrs. Kipps strike up an unlikely friendship of mutual compassion. Vee enrolls in Howard's class alongside Zora for a semester of slamming art as Western myth.

"On Beauty" both elevates and betrays reality. Smith can deliver true scenes that move the reader. A notable chapter takes the perspective of a brilliant student in Howard's course, and Smith succeeds in generating real sympathy for the girl, while also cleverly inserting a commentary on the text. Later, the reunion of Howard and his father, presented as only an aside to the main action, is remarkable in its honesty.

But the very quantity of these unlikely plot twists detracts from the novel. Peculiar things happen when they don't need to. Two characters suffer bouts of unrequited love that are unrealistically parallel. And a professor, traveling abroad, somehow manages to come across his student in a jungle-painted boudoir. The issue here isn't that the unlikely should be banned from novels, but rather that in a novel so invested in exploring the real, intrusions of the unreal merely weaken it.

The novel also takes on an incredible scope of social ills, so many that it cannot satisfactorily discuss any. Racism and race relations underlie much of the dynamic: Howard is a white Englishman, Kiki is a black American and their kids lie somewhere in between, displaced from both their parents' cultures. The novel also discusses the pettiness of academia, foreign imported poverty in America and class tension, not to mention the titular question of aesthetics. The scope is so rich that it overwhelms.

But Smith herself may recognize these problems. In an interview with the Village Voice, Smith acknowledged E.M. Forster as both a great literary influence — "On Beauty" is Smith's update of Forster's "Howard's End — and a novelist of great literary flaws, remarking, "When I read novels, their failures are part of what I love about them." Perhaps she constructed these failures deliberately so that her readers might love her novel.

And actually, it's not so hard to love. Smith's prose style is delectable, her descriptions of characters evocative and whimsical and she has a good ear — the cadence of her characters' dialogue is authentic. Smith has literary flair, and not the sort that comes off as pretension; she's got the better stuff that needs not trumpet its own style. As a whole, no, but in moments "On Beauty" is in itself beautiful, as well as an enjoyable read. Especially good for days when you'd like to strangle that Zora in your precept.