Zadie Smith’s novel, the Man Booker finalist “On Beauty,” is such a vibrant book that it is easy to get caught up in the story and completely blow by its subtler lessons. This aptly titled work is a consideration of beauty in all its aspects, one that asks thoughtful attention from the reader but returns understanding in equal or greater measure.
Smith, interviewed in Denver while on her book tour, said the title was, in part, a joke. “I wanted the book to be titled like an essay, but for the way it explicates that title to be fictional,” she said. “If you write an essay on beauty you’d write arguments, cases, discussions of what beauty’s for, of what it means. I like the idea of doing all those things in a novel, without the rigidity, and doing it through human behavior.” But also, she said, she simply liked the title and, once a title is picked, she tends to stick with it.
“On Beauty” revolves around the lives of two very different families linked by circumstance. Howard Belsey and his wife, Kiki, live in Wellington, Mass., a town that has grown up around an elite private college of the same name. Howard is a professor of art history, and for several years he has nursed a feud with conservative Monty Kipps. The nemesis, usually separated from Howard by at least the breadth of the Atlantic, has been invited to spend a year at Wellington College. The paths of the two families will now cross professionally and personally, through the lives of their children.
“It should be obvious from the first line,” Smith writes in the acknowledgments, “that this is a novel inspired by a love of E.M. Forster, to whom all my fiction is indebted, one way or another. This time I wanted to repay the debt with homage.”
Her fascination with Forster stems from “his interest in the personal life of people rather than their public life.”
Forster’s themes and phrasings contribute to the final work.
“This was meant to be a book full of the things I love, and Forster is one of those things I love,” she said.
The direct inspiration for Smith’s novel is “Howards End,” Forster’s story of the Schlegel sisters and their relationship to the Wilcox family. Class and economic status, and how these affect relationships, are central to Forster’s work, and Smith casts his themes in a more contemporary light.
It isn’t unusual for a writer to draw inspiration from earlier works, she said.
“I don’t know how strong the drawing is. When I wrote the book, neither of my editors noticed it was based on ‘Howards End.’ I had to tell them,” she said
In fact, only three scenes are drawn directly from the Forster novel: One that takes place at a public concert in Boston, one dealing with an inheritance, and the first scene, in which Howard’s son writes to tell his father he has fallen in love with the daughter of the reviled Monty Kipps.
Much of the richness of “On Beauty” derives from the diversity of its finely drawn characters.
“I don’t think they are any more varied than the people in this room or maybe the people you work with,” she said. “I don’t know that many people who only know only 35-year-old white women, for instance. That’s not a very usual experience. I’m just trying to reflect the normal world that people live in,” said Smith.
That said, Smith’s characters are unusual in that each is a fully realized individual with unique strengths and flaws.
“I suppose when I write people, I just try to put myself into their skin and not become too concerned about whether they are accurately portrayed. They are fictional; they don’t need to be accurate to anyone other than themselves. I’m not trying to create the perfect middle-aged art professor, I’m just trying to create Harold, for example, or Kiki. There are no facts that I have to match, they are my own characters. I make them how I like,” she said.
The single character based on a real person, Smith said, is Howard and Kiki’s 16-year-old son, Levi, who is modeled after her hip-hop loving younger brother. And Kiki, a strong woman and outstanding parent, is the character of whom Smith is most proud. Part of the affection springs from the well-justified belief that Kiki is welldrawn, but part of it stems from Kiki’s persona.
“She has sense. She’s quite humane. She’s open to experiences. She’s not a hypocrite, which is a great virtue in a book of hypocrites,” Smith said.
The university environs and its surrounding town both come through as strongly as the characters. It is clear that much of the book grew out of the nine months Smith, who lives in England, spent as a guest lecturer at Harvard. What is perhaps surprising are the parts that did not.
She loved the time spent at the university, and the politics in the book are not, she says, based on personal experience. “Most people have an idea of what goes on in universities, I just elaborated upon that,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s accurate. I’m not interested in writing accurately, I’m just interested that creating fictions that you can live in and spend time in.”
The campus activities largely reflect her experiences as a student.
“A lot of it is imagined, a lot of it from other campus novels,” She said. “I don’t really write from life, if I do it takes a very long time for the experience to turn up in the prose.”
The characters are works of the imagination, but the setting owes much to time spent in Cambridge.
“Most of the bits of Harvard that show up in the book are streets and shops and landscapes and trees,” said Smith. “The one thing I find very hard to imagine is place. I can’t imagine towns, I need to think of a street and a corner, I don’t have that much imagination.”
Smith said she enjoyed the time spent in the Northeast, “Mostly because I really loved Massachusetts. It was extremely cold, so that shows up a lot in the book. There’s a lot of snow I don’t leave home very often, and that was a nice experience to try and live somewhere and see what that’s like. You see things afresh. The seasons are very extreme. It was a very different life, and I really enjoyed that.”
On Beauty
By Zadie Smith
Penguin, 464 pages, $25.95
