On Beauty, Zadie Smith

An espaliered apple tree from Grasshoper Gardens. Espaliered trees are trained on

By the second chapter, I caught myself luxuriating in a sense of richness and naturalism that is maybe not in fashion today, thinking this is like a 19th century novel. Off by eleven years! On Beauty (2005) is a reworking of Forster’s 1910 Howards End, something which took me much too long to notice: the first epistolary chapter, the second chapter around the breakfast table, match beat-for-beat.

The obvious difference between the two books (besides the time setting) is racial. Both novels are about the relationships between two high-upper-middle-class families. But the two central families in Howards End are white, & the two central families in On Beauty are a black British family on the one hand, and on the other, a white British man and a black American woman with their biracial American children.¹ Smith’s investigation into race and class feels experimental to me—not as in “experimental literature”² but as in “experimental science,” carefully altering one variable at a time. How do the black upper-class characters interact with white upper-class characters, who share their class but not their race? How do the black upper-class characters interact with characters who share their race but not their class? How do the biracial characters interact with people who share their white background but not their black background, or characters who share their black background but not their white background? When are divides are unbridgeable, and where is it possible for the characters to connect? What about nationality, gender, physical beauty? The careful, thorough testing of every possible difference between the central characters and those around them, results in sharply observed scenes.

Obviously it’s basically impossible to talk about this book without comparing it to Howards End. So I will.

I was underwhelmed by Howards End on my first, teenaged reading. I was just too young for it, I think—it’s an especially middle-aged story.³ Years later I watched the Merchant & Ivory adaptation, not really expecting anything more than pretty visuals, and was unexpectedly blown away by the perfect parallels and symmetries in the plot. I rushed to reread the book, which was—obviously—even better narratively structured than the movie. So, it was my fault I didn’t get Howards End the first time, but Merchant and Ivory have given me a permanent gift by making the novel more available to me. (I had a similar thing with Sense and Sensibility. I mean, I always loved the book—certainly more than I liked Howards End at first—but Colonel Brandon was just too milquetoast for me to be fully satisfied. But Alan Rickman did such a great Colonel Brandon that it permanently improved my enjoyment of the novel. And I’m really, really hoping I have the same thing with A Room with a View. I read it for the first time recently, and it was just too vague for me. Sometime soon I’ll watch the Merchant & Ivory in hopes that they open the novel up for me, as they did with Howards end. But…I did love On Beauty immediately. Immediately immersive. That’s probably partly because Forster cured me of some of my faults as a reader…but also, I think Forster is just consistently a little vaguer and less immersive than Smith.

But. Of the two books, Howards End is much more satisfyingly symmetrical. Nothing in On Beauty approaches—spoiler!—the almost slapstick perfection of Helen Schlegel condemning Henry Wilcox for the affair that ruined much-less-privileged Jacky Bast’s life, and then immediately sleeping with Jacky’s husband Leonard, which results in Leonard’s life being ruined far more thoroughly. And I think that structure matters more than surface style.

I doubt Smith would be very insulted by anyone pointing out that an acknowledged all-timer like Forster is better at narrative structure than she is. I’m sure she agrees! Her first novel White Teeth, published three years before On Beauty, is fun and genius and also kind of falls apart at the end. It shows wisdom, self-awareness, and taste for Smith to use a great master’s plot as scaffolding. Besides White Teeth and On Beauty, I’ve only read Smith’s essays and maybe a few short stories—I’m curious to read NW, Swing Time, and The Fraud, to see how her structural abilities have developed. I imagine that maybe it worked like espaliering a tree: that imitating Forster allowed her to train her narrative imagination on a kind of trellis, and that this temporary support allowed her narrative imagination to grow strong enough to stand free. But so far that sounds as if I’m only interested in reading Smith’s later novels to see if she learned her lesson—I want to read them because I expect to love them! I loved On Beauty and I expect her work to get better and better from an already excellent start.

1. This doesn’t really matter, but Smith’s Americans have a habit of breaking my suspension of disbelief with their Briticisms. The Belsey-Simmonds family does have a British dad, so when they say holiday or trainer or whatever, I tell myself they picked it up from him. But…it still feels wrong. The Belsey kids—like most smart kids with parents from different countries, different races—are pretty sensitive to minor inflections of race and nationality in class. Levi in particular would just not drop that many British idioms. On Beauty’s greatest virtues are its immersiveness, its naturalism, its sharp social observation—the Briticisms are very tiny flaws, but they disrupt those three virtues particularly, so I found them disproportionately grating.

2. I’m sure I’ve said this before but I hate this phrase so much. Most literature that gets called experimental is not trying anything particularly new—it’s participating in an established style and genre of “experimental literature.” I would like and respect that genre more if it acknowledged that, at this point, it’s a tradition and not an innovation! Honestly, experimental psychology could learn a lot from experimental literature. No one could accuse experimental literature of having a replication crisis, when it gets the same results every time.

3. People say the same thing about the Aeneid, which I was also underwhelmed by the first time I read it, as a child; maybe time for a reread?