Review: On Beauty

This time I finished reading On Beauty in record time; record time in terms of my reading speed. I took a week to read the first 15 pages, and then I read the entire book this weekend.

On Beauty more or less defines my taste. This is what I like to read; this is the stuff that tickles my literary taste buds. I like bland food that is devoid of all embellishments and masalas but when it comes to reading literature — whether fiction or non-fiction — it has to contain the masala elements. I don’t like bland literature. I don’t like “simple facts of life beautifully written in small sentences.” No. I like my reading complicated. I don’t mind if a sentence stretches to a paragraph and there are at least 3-4 words in that paragraph that are incomprehensible to most readers. This is the pickle for me that make the book, the reading material in it, tasty. I like writers who can juggle with words and orchestrate intricately beautiful patterns with them. OK, if you are Kundera, it’s totally a different matter. But then, enough with my stylistic proclivities.

The book is mostly about the university life of Wellington — a posh, laidback American suburb near Boston. A black family having a white, British father lives there. The father, Howard, is a Rembrandt scholar and is the professor of liberal arts in the university, and is at loggerheads with another black professor — Monty Kipps — a thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt, again, and hence the conflict, who is hell bent upon taking the word “liberal” out of liberal arts.

Howard’s family consists of a big-black-but-beautiful wife Kiki, the eldest son Jerome who falls in love with Monty Kipps’ daughter Victoria (who is out to get laid by all and sundry throughout the novel), a daughter named Zora who is a pseudo-scholastic intellectual pursuing arts studies in the same university, and the youngest son named Levi who tries to get to the root of his black identity in a white neighborhood and ends up with a group of Haitian thieves. And of course, they have a dog named Murdoch.

The underlying theme of the novel seems to highlight that you can never be too sure of your ideologies and intellectual pursuits. Almost all the characters are proven wrong in the end whether throughout the book you agree with their opinions or not. Levi (who cannot go out without his iPod), while all the time trying to fight for the cause of the underpaid Haitians, ends up a thief. Zora all the time defends her father’s infidelity but in the end finds she was on the wrong side of the debate. The only stable person in the novel is Jerome, with whose emails to his father the novel begins (ummm…I wonder if this is a right sentence). In a series of emails to his father — who doesn’t seem to be replying because Jerome has decided to go to London and work under his rival, Monty Kipps — Jerome reveals that he and Kipps’ daughter are getting married. It’s from here that the story moves forward.

You can call it a saga of intellectual hypocrisy — this book — with both opposing professors having no moral clue of exactly what they think. Both end up having sex with their students without emotional ties, both are selfish and self-obsessed and not particularly interested in the affairs of their families. Howard cannot even put up a decent fight with his wife because all the time either he is guilt-ridden, or too genteel to show aggression. He even tries to justify to Kiki why he ended up in bed with their common friend (a 50-year-old professor of modern poetry in the same university). I think he is also uncomfortable with his predominantly black family (all the children are dark or semi-dark) although it is never mentioned in the novel.

The same is true for the Wellington University. They claim to espouse for liberalism and openness while wallowing in the same old mud of prejudice, raw ambition, arrogance, deceit and exploitation.

Even when Kiki and Howard’s daughter, Zora, tries to help a street rapper, Carl, to get some decent college education, her underlying motive is to portray herself as a highly sophisticated crusader, to get some romantic attention from the handsome rapper.

On Beauty does not have a central character: all the characters pursue their individual obfuscations and contribute to the overall deceitfulness of their natures

A few reviews I’ve read suggest Zadie Smith got inspired by EM Forster’s Howards End. I’ve never read Forster so I cannot draw qualified parallels, but she knows how to write. She is a Bohemian expressionist, you may say. She doesn’t dabble with the hyperbole and remains rooted to the ground. Despite her literary grip and command she doesn’t get carried away and concentrates more on the narrative and lets the style effervesce at its own discretion. This book is worth a read.