Green Reads: Books to Lounge By

Published September 10, 2007

By Suzanne Lunden

I finished Zadie Smith’s On Beauty about an hour ago and am staring out of my bedroom window at the wreckage of Friday night on Buell Street glinting in the sun. As I sit down to write I’m realizing that I don’t really like book reviews.

It doesn’t matter if you read them after you read the book, and agree almost entirely with what the reviewer says, or if you feel you have found a kindred spirit among books. Still, there is that lurking feeling that something has been lost, that your tears and giggles and turns of stomach are weakened, even as they are made immortal by their translation to words by a stranger.

In On Beauty, Zadie Smith explores this loss, this gap between the subjective experience and the objective definition, within the context of the difficulties and experiences of the Belsey family. We witness the successes and failures of each family member as they attempt to reconcile their various projected identities (politically active gangsta, poetess with interesting hats, born-again Christian) with the trials and tribulations of everyday life in a constantly changing world – and each other.

Particularly entertaining are the spots detailing university life—the familiar lofty ideals and lusty underbelly— through the experiences of Zora, the daughter determined to be brilliant, and the father/husband, Professor Howard Belsey, so engulfed in the politics of beauty that he fails to recognize the beauty of his own complicated life.

Luckily, revealing these beauties with subtlety, care, and a hefty helping of humor (or humour, as she’d put it) is what Zadie Smith does best. She makes the academic - real life connections that your professors dream of making— weaving almost seamlessly the argument for rap as poetry, the aesthetics of Rembrandt and sexual desire, the black suburban experience, and the British academic worldview, wealth distribution theory in Haiti, and the affirmative-action policy debate in the United States.

Infused with these issues but never quite playing second fiddle is the painfully true saga of the Belsey family. Their story created an entangled web of their lives together – built with strands that cannot be severed, neither by devastating mistakes nor earnest effort.

This struggle for balance—between definition and irrationality, principles and passion, love and sex— gives On Beauty that utterly recognizable yet enlightening feel, evocative and entertaining in all those ways words can never express.

Enjoy yourself.

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