The Eyes of Beholders
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
The Penguin Press, 2005
(443 pages, $25.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Mark Bauerlein
When Zadie Smith’s third novel appeared last September, Frank Rich in the New York Times praised the author as a “fearless outside referee” ready to “adjudicate the culture wars.” Laura Miller in Salon remarked upon how the “foil” of “ideological battles” in the novel set the characters into sharp relief.
Left & Right
The dramaturgy of On Beauty does, indeed, bear them out. We have two families and two ideologies in stark counterpoint. Howard Belsey, born in working-class London, is an art historian at Wellington College in Boston, and he has the standard traits of the vocation: leftist politics, secular beliefs, irreverently postmodern scholarship. He despises the notion of genius and considers Rembrandt a lackey of the Dutch burghers.
On the other side stands Monty Kipps, a devout Christian from Trinidad living in London as a famous art historian who reveres tradition and a notorious conservative who scorns affirmative action. Howard resents Monty’s public success, while Monty abhors liberalism’s stranglehold on the university. A visiting professorship brings Monty to Wellington for the year, culminating in the two facing off at a faculty meeting in the spring.
But the novel’s parallel of the two is uneven, for Monty appears in only a dozen or so pages in the entire book. He has no inner life, and his starchy demeanor and abrasive remarks apparently serve as sufficient characterization of the conservative outlook.
Howard’s wife Kiki is a black woman from Florida, beautiful and corpulent, not intellectual but sensitive to others. At the start of the story, she suffers from her husband’s infidelity, and the trauma prompts her to think beyond his worldview for the first time in their thirty-year marriage. They have three children: Jerome, a student at Brown University who recently converted to Christianity; Zora, a Wellington student who pleases her father by plunging into progressive causes on campus; and Levi, a high-schooler who falls in with Haitian street hustlers doubling as rap artists/protesters.
Monty’s wife Carlene, a devout Christian, is dying of cancer, but she tells Kiki (who befriends her) that she is proud to have dedicated her life to her husband. Their daughter Victoria, though, is a wayward beauty bent on sexual power. Early on, she seduces and rejects Jerome before moving on to a gritty dalliance with her professor at Wellington, Howard himself.
Illuminating Clash
Howard’s personal failings and political outlook are the center of the conflicts, as he campaigns against Monty’s “hate speech” and tries to save his marriage from his own depravity.
Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University, and the author of Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books). He recently stepped down as Director of Research at the National Endowment for the Arts. He and his wife have a six-month-old son, and they attend Buckhead Community Church in Atlanta.
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