Zadie Smith On Beauty Analysis

Take the consummate ideals of beauty and clash it against the paradoxes of the human condition and you get Zadie Smith’s fresh and original “On Beauty”. “On Beauty” follows Smith’s critically acclaimed “White Teeth” novel in her writing style that is smart, observant and humorously ingrained with current politics. The novel centers around the rivalry between the liberal sharp-tongued Belsey family and the conservative close-knit Kipps family. Both patriarchs, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, are erudite art professors with polar opposite politics whose academic and personal tug-a-war is set in the prestigious fictional Wellington University in Boston. “On Beauty” serves as Smith’s thesis on beauty which deconstructs its ideals such as art, love

and truth by playing it against the ugliness of flawed humans. Based loosely on “Howards End” by E.M Forester, the parallels in the plot between the two novels are made current with Smith’s clever use of culture.
“On Beauty” centers on the two ethically polar opposite families Belseys and Kipps whose lives become intertwined as the novel progresses. White British Howard Belsey has been married to African-American Kiki Belsey for thirty years and they have three children. Howard has been a knowledgeable yet cut-throat professor of Art History. He makes a living on intellectually diminishing esteemed culture, such as Mozart and Rembrandt to a “Western myth which we both (use to) console ourselves and make ourselves”. His wife strong and practical Kiki, a lead administrator at a hospital, was once an owner of “a neat waist” but now inhabits a body that is 250 pounds. Their children are oldest Jerome the newly converted Christian black sheep in his atheist family, middle child opinionated and domineering college sophomore Zora and youngest teenaged Levi, who identifies himself as “street” with his acquired Brooklyn accent, love of hip hop and distrust of white people. Their thirty year union is rocked before the novel begins with Howard’s infidelity at a conference. Together they live primarily in the white upper middle class suburb near Wellington University. The novel opens with emails from Jerome, who has gone rogue in the eyes of his family to take an internship with his father’s known academic rival, Monty Kipps. Caribbean, Christian and family-oriented the Kipps are a stark contrast to the Belseys which Jerome mentions incredulously in his emails “I never met a family who wanted to spend so much time with each other”. Patriarch of the Kipps household Monty Kipps, also an art professor with a specialization like Howard in Rembrandt, has moved in similar academic circles at various panel discussions and in art journals as Howard for fifteen years sharing his vastly different viewpoint than Howards. The Kipps family consist of Monty’s wife the submissive and dutiful Carlene, eldest Michael a financial analyst who shares his father’s traditional values and beautiful but promiscuous college freshman Victoria, who takes both Jerome’s virginity and sanity when he asks her to marry him after one week of acquaintance. Her family's denial of his request prompts Jerome’s awkward removal from the Kipps house.
Throughout the course of the novel each character’s humanity clashes haphazardly against some form of beauty and it is in these contrasts that Smith captivates her readers.

The main clash comes from Howard’s struggle with the beauty in love versus his human self-sabotaging desire. Howard loves his wife. Yet he stumbles into a three week affair with longtime family friend and colleague Claire Malcolm and later into another joyless one with his student Victoria Kipps. He battles his disconnected sense of what should be valued as beauty, like family and true love, with his flawed desire that seeks artificial beauty. Kiki struggles against the ideals of feminine beauty versus what has become of her over time. Once a sex symbol in her youth, she now realizes that her image has changed to what “white American boys view as the Aunt Jemima on the cookie boxes of her childhood”. Jerome battles the ideal of beauty in family versus the dysfunction that exist in his household. When he falls in love with Victoria Kipps he later understands that he fell in love with the idea of wholeness in a family that her clan emanates. Zora Belsey’s battle is against the idea of fairness in beauty and the unfairness in reality. After she uses her skills to tirelessly advocate for the inclusion of handsome, talented yet unprivileged Carl Thomas in a poetry class, she is (in her mind) unfairly rewarded by finding he has slept with another better looking student and really cares little about her efforts. Levi battles with the idea of truth versus fakes. He views the streets as the epitome of truth and black realness, but finds out through his unlikely friendship with a Haitian counterfeit street vendor that truth is not so black and

white.
The novel finally dismantles the ideals of beauty with the revealed equal hypocrisy of both families. Howard once again cheats on his wife and she leaves him struggling in a now giant void left by the beauty of her lifetime love and loyalty now gone from his life. Monty Kipps for all his righteous beliefs is revealed to also be unfaithful in his treatment of his wife by cheating on her and not permitting her dying request to give her friend, Kiki Belsey, a valuable painting. Beauty is thusly dismantled and reveals the lack of beautifulness in the human condition.
Smith’s novel was a delightfully intellectual and thoughtful read. With her intriguingly flawed characters and the combination of culture conflicts, it reminds readers in this sunset age of the novel just why novels are essential to the human race. By examining our flawed condition against the ideal ubiquitous image of human perfection or beauty, we can then see our connectedness in our collected fall from this idealized identity. Thus, making Smith’s novel a thing of beauty indeed.