A beautiful tough-girl's face." Their eldest child, the dreamy, committedly Christian Jerome, attends Brown his sister, Zora, an insecure, self-absorbed study-machine, is a sophomore at Wellington and the youngest, Levi, goes to high school but dresses and acts as if he were a gangsta from Roxbury.
At fifty two, her face was still a girl's face.
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. Once slender, she "was nowadays a solid two hundred and fifty pounds, and looked twenty years his junior. He could identify thirty different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was." His strong, no-nonsense, African-American wife, Kiki, works as a nurse. "Like many academics, Howard was innocent of the world. He's been there for 10 years now and has yet to publish his big book on Rembrandt and isn't tenured as a consequence. political correctness, the heavy hand of bureaucratic officialism, the claims of traditional learning against the allure of more fashionable subjects, the betrayal of noble ideals.Īll these play their allotted parts in On Beauty, but center stage stands the Belsey family, arguing, slamming doors, increasingly beleaguered, confused and heartbroken.Īt 56, Howard, the son of an English butcher, teaches art history at Wellington College. Such a narrow subgenre ineluctably gravitates to a half-dozen now familiar themes: the excesses of critical jargon, sexual entanglement between student and teacher, departmental politicking (especially in the race for tenure), academic freedom vs. The past 40 years have generated a substantial syllabus, even a college catalogue, of first-rate novels about academic life: among many others, Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, David Lodge's Small World, Francine Prose's Blue Angel, Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, James Hynes's The Lecturer's Tale, Richard Russo's Straight Man and Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons. Perhaps only in her choice of setting - a contemporary university campus in Boston - is Smith somewhat unimaginative. To this satirical, wise and sexy book, the correct critical response should largely be either gratitude and admiration or a simple "Wow." Little wonder that it's just been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Smith brings to blazing life everyone she portrays, from a young hip-hop poet to a very formal British lord. Her new novel is masterly on almost any level - impressive in its command of every register of English, never tiresome despite its length and astonishingly sympathetic to every sort of human frailty. $25.95 While reading On Beauty it's easy to forget, and sometimes hard to believe, that Zadie Smith is scarcely out of her twenties.
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