High Art as a Straitjacket
MARTIN, MARK
High Art as a Strait jacket On Beauty By Zadie Smith Penguin. 446 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Mark Martin Contributor, the "Guardian" Zadie Smith was hailed as a Wunderkind for the highly...
...Various narrative strands accumulate around the rivalry...
...Smith does not stick with it long enough...
...Further subplots involve the Belseys' middle child, Zora, a Wellington sophomore infatuated with a handsome scholarship student, and their hip-hop-loving youngest child, Levi, who falls in with some disaffected Haitians...
...An example is the following evocation of an evening concert in a city park: "The Boston primness Howard associated with these kinds of events could not quite survive the mass of hot bodies and the crepitations of the crickets, the soft, damp bark of the trees and the atonal tuning of instruments— and all of this was to the good...
...The Belseys' marriage has hit the hard edge of age and anatomy...
...or she might continue along a rockier path, less natural to her talents, but potentially more rewarding...
...A stupid, cowardly, pointless thing to say...
...In the earlier novels Smith's prose is pyrotechnical...
...But the greatest effects this kind of writing can achieve require sustained effort...
...If somewhat narrow in emotional range, her books were rich with wry observations...
...How did that happen again...
...She leaps through different registers, from hip slang to scientific terminology...
...Unfortunately, more often sty le is not consonant with subject...
...Monty is a sampler of Right-wing sound bites dressed up in a waistcoat with pocket watch...
...On Beauty presents an author at a crossroads...
...Forster...
...The novel opens with a series of emails from the eldest child of the Belsey clan, 19-year-old Jerome, to his father...
...WITH On Beauty Smith holds herself back and aims for something more dignified...
...If they fail to couple with the most beautiful people they meet, their hopeless infatuations are hardly tragic...
...Jerome upsets his dad by falling for Monty's daughter, Victoria, and writes home to say they are engaged...
...Meanwhile sex with [her boyfriend] Warren was newly ecstatic and always completed with guilty tears, which Warren misinterpreted, in his innocence, as joy...
...Too much attention is paid to characters and actions crying out for the old-style Smith...
...His growing distrust of art parallels a development at home...
...The son is in London working as an intern for Howard's bête noir, Monty Kipps...
...But the Kippses reappear after Monty takes a job at Wellington, where he begins to make trouble for the resident liberals...
...Now that they are at odds, their idioms collide where once they complemented each other...
...Sir Monty is a British Trinidadian, prominent in the UK media...
...To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion...
...Occasionally Smith does provide the voice her story demands...
...but it's truer At this point, halfway through the book, Smith has steered us toward certain overwhelming questions: Does art exist on the same aesthetic continuum as good looks...
...Howard is insultingly reasonable when he comes on "like a lawyer...
...If she is intent on the latter, then On Beauty, despite its intermittent brilliance, suggests she is not yet entirely committed to her choice...
...When these intriguing issues emerge the novel's weaknesses also become more apparent...
...it is also an attempt to be more disciplined and sensitive than previously...
...She has mentioned that her favorite line from White Teeth is "Kelvin smiled: a sudden gash across his face that came and went with the violence of a fat man walking through swing doors...
...she jumps between times and places in the space of a single clause...
...THE major events of the novel occur in the aftermath of Kiki's initial discovery of her husband's infidelity...
...She may return to writing books with enough laughs in them to make your toes curl, forged of wit, keen observation and, arguably, small substance...
...Such fireworks sometimes leave little room for her characters, but the narrative voice in the first two books keeps us riveted...
...Yellow lanterns, the color of rapeseed, hung in the branches of the trees...
...There are also stylistic inconsistencies...
...Howard is a white Londoner whose working-class roots are concealed by an Oxford education...
...A profusion of italics and ellipses in a journai is given awkward emphasis with a poetic flourish: "Slanted sails blowing about on perforated seas...
...Jerome and Zora, on the other hand, are just learning their place in the world's sexual economy...
...Kiki, "whom Howard had once, 28 years ago, thrown over his shoulder like a light roll of carpet," now "weighs a solid 250 pounds...
...Kiki is unable to respond with anything but anger to his efforts to negotiate a peace...
...The other woman, Claire Malcolm, possesses a number of attributes Kiki lacks: She is a successful professional, a poet, white, and—most hurtful of all—petite...
...He used to love Mozart and wooed his wife with great novels, but as she lost her figure, Howard became skeptical of beauty in all its forms...
...Kipps, who dies and leaves Kiki a valuable portrait, a bequest Monty tries to keep secret...
...A black Floridian, Kiki holds a modest job as an administrator in a local hospital...
...concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world—and that's clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes...
...How can this couple escape the fate determined for them by physiology...
...When she asks her husband to tell the truth, his faltering reply is honest yet insensitive: "It's true that men—they respond to beauty it doesn't end for them, this...
...Meanwhile, Kiki befriends the ailing Mrs...
...As for the Kippses, they register as no more than blips on the radar...
...At the heart of the problem is an imbalance in contrasts...
...a stranded quote from Philip Larkin that is both obscure and distracting...
...These tributaries, which shadow Howards End, serve primarily to shed light on Howard and Kiki...
...As she states in her acknowledgments, On Beauty is an "hommage" to E.M...
...Reviewed by Mark Martin Contributor, the "Guardian" Zadie Smith was hailed as a Wunderkind for the highly inventive, fast-paced comedy of her first two novels, White Teeth (2000) and The Autograph Man (2002...
...We are assured that their education and middle-class privilege will see them through in the long run...
...A better novel is fighting to escape the straitjacket of the story the author is bent on telling...
...Smith is a great fan of the comically exaggerated comparison...
...A Godfearing pro-lifer and opponent of affirmative action, he is an apt object for Howard's Leftist disdain...
...They often said this or something like it...
...The romance soon expires...
...Howard is smitten by the beautiful and callous Victoria, now enrolled at the college, and the infatuation leads to his marriage's graceless coup de grâce...
...Now 30, Smith has stretched her substantial talents considerably by writing—or, more accurately, rewriting—a very old-fashioned novel...
...She finds it hard to keep her exuberance in check...
...Her narrators are omniscient, and often obtrusive...
...Tension mounts, and when the couple at last burst into argument, Smith's dialogue mixes pathos, the inadvertent humor of spousal bickering, and the banality of marital deceit in a manner reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman or the best of Woody Allen...
...They also feel like an excuse for the author to catch her breath before returning to her main themes...
...Much of the best writing here is in the form of interior monologue, as when Claire reflects on her affair with Howard: "Then they would get up and dress...
...A kettle boils and we are stalled by an echo of Hamlet that is out of place in the mundane scene being depicted: "There was only this one high note—the rest was silence.'- A description of a spring morning is broken up by three bare adverbs—"Afresh, afresh, afresh...
...This captures the moral problems of adultery in a way suggestive of careful imaginative consideration...
...Like Forster's Howards End (1910), On Beauty contrasts two families, but the true axis of the story is the foundering marriage of Howard and Kiki Belsey...
...An allusion to marital difficulty falls with a clang as "an offer to kick open a door in the mansion of their marriage leading to an antechamber of misery...
...The two-family structure Smith has appropriated from Howards End sags as the flawed but funny Howard elbows his way to the front as the character who most engages his creator's imagination...
...An art historian at Wellington College in New England, he has come to hate the paintings he studies: "Howard asked his students to imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears...
...Though each sentence is well crafted, flashy phrases keep cropping up and striking wrong notes...
...she sprinkles quotations...
Vol. 88 • September 2005 • No. 5
