Kiki Belsey in On Beauty, Zadie Smith's third novel, is the year's best female literary lead.
If there were Academy Awards for literature, in which parts of books could be individually recognized, Kiki Belsey would be in the running for this year's Best Female Protagonist. Zadie Smith's third novel, On Beauty, belongs wholly to Kiki though the main plot concerns her left-wing husband Howard's academic and personal battles with conservative humanist Monty Kipps. It is Kiki's ability, however, to act as moral compass and dominate one's attention as much offstage as on that renders her so forcefully real in a story about the messy incongruities of being human.
Such inner disconnectedness from ideals and others is familiar to territory to Smith's muse, E. M. Forster. The framework of On Beauty is purposefully wedded to Forster's seminal Howard's End, translating Edwardian England to New England and the warring families of the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes into the Belseys and the Kippses.
Although it makes for a short-lived clunky feel as the story gets on its feet, this pseudo-postcolonial updating works as long as grand expectations are kept to a minimum. The device serves little purpose beyond Smith's purpose of "hommage." Unlike other contemporary novels that revisit classics by way of narrative or perspective in order to subvert them, demonstrate their enduring relevance in new light, or tease out new meaning via context and meditation (Michael Cunningham's The Hours, Valerie Martin's Mary Reilly, or even Alice Randall's self-righteous parody, The Wind Done Gone, to name a few), On Beauty does not reinvent Forster for a new generation, but conjures him in Smith's own style: "Kiki recalled being invincible and truth-loving and twenty years old; remembered feeling exactly this: that if her family could only speak the truth, together they would emerge, weeping but clear-eyed, into the light." Beyond such echoes in sentiment and structure, the book presents itself as a labor of love offered in flattery's sincerest form—a structural gesture that has as much to say about beauty and art as any of the characters.
Returning to her character, Kiki is a nexus of extremes. She is a black southerner living in a "sea of white" in the fictional college town of Wellington outside of Boston, married to a white British scholar of Rembrandt. She is substantially overweight while Howard is thin. She returns Howard's coldly postmodern tunnel vision and denial of all things beautiful with no-nonsense love and acceptance. She is a self-professed non-intellectual, working as a hospital administrator, who comes home to academic rhetoric, posturing, and campus culture wars. She possesses a wise beauty, articulated with informal, earthy frankness, whose only measure is the generousness of her booty. She is the Venus of Willendorf; she is Mammy. She embodies stereotype and explodes it:
"... Kiki suspected already that this would be one of those exchanges in which her enormous spellbinding bosom would play a subtle (or not so subtle, depending on the person) silent third role in the conversation. Women bent away from it out of politeness; men—more comfortably for Kiki—sometimes remarked in order to get on and over it, as it were. The size was sexual and at the same time more than sexual: sex was only one small element of its symbolic range. If she were white, maybe it would refer only to sex, but she was not. And so her chest gave off a mass of signals beyond her direct control: sassy, sisterly, predatory, motherly, threatening, comforting—it was a mirror-world she had stepped into in her mid forties, a strange fabulation of the person she believed she was."
One of the novel's most perplexing mysteries is how this self-aware, pleasure-loving woman could be married thirty years to a recovering adulterer, who realizes "he could no longer gauge the luxuries of his own life" as the novel opens. The question becomes more baffling as the novel progresses: "'Could you have found anybody less like me if you'd scoured the earth?' she said, thumping the table with her fist. 'My leg weighs more than that woman. What have you made look like in front of everybody in this town? You married a big black bitch and you run off with a fucking leprechaun?'" The marriage would almost require a willing suspension of disbelief, if it were not for Howard's reasoning.
For it seems natural to their children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi; friends; and, indeed, Smith that the bedrock of Howard's adoration of his wife and best friend is that "he never really got over her face." The reader, too, must accept this rare, romantic justification because it is only through Kiki that Howard achieves humanity (which, incidentally, he seeks to abolish from the study of Rembrandt). This belief is also the single thread to his possible, but never certain, redemption. Without a connection to Kiki's life force, Howard is just another embittered, witty, stock academic, not to mention a bad liberal. Whether that constitutes enough of a hinge to unite such foils in the first place, much less tear them apart, goes back to the idea of beauty and the human in art.
Some reviewers have remarked that On Beauty is a novel of ideas, which is to say it wears them on its sleeve as opposed to fiction whose ideas are more imbued or implied. That description, however, takes the treatise-like title too seriously and shortchanges the Belseys' explosive confrontations and inner-turmoil, exposed in simple, delicate layers. Smith does raise debated ideas—freedom of speech, affirmative action, critical theory, and more abstract principles like beauty and justice—at pivotal turning points but does not flesh out their contested aspects in great detail. Smith's intelligence and talent lie in her ability to empathize and think through feeling; therefore, thankfully, the book expects readers to emotionally graph the issues and not analyze them as intricate, ideological wallpaper against which the action occurs. The true novel of ideas is much more politicized than On Beauty, which, like Kiki, does not dive headlong into the political but wades into the shallow end.
As Kiki makes clear, despite questions from the outside of the marriage looking in, the book is primarily a novel of situational characterization and social as well as class differences. Race, of course, is a fundamental part of the novel, but it is secondary to other degrees of difference—a refreshing variation on a theme when labels and classifications in fiction are all the fashion. In certain ways, Smith's characters are more authentically black because they inhabit a novel whose class borders are fluid. Racial identity is explored and preserved not because they encounter a spectrum of social and class difference but because they have been enhanced by it.
This aspect is seen not just in the demise of the Belsey marriage vis à vis the Kipps family but the lives of the Belsey children, who each inherited brazen go-it-alone streaks from their Howard. Jerome receives an internship to study with his father's nemesis, then promptly becomes Christian and falls in love with Monty's brilliant, predatory daughter, Veronica. Zora, a precocious, calculating brownnoser, wants desperately to break into the academic world on her father's rather short coat tails. Finally, Levi strives to be "street" and, in order to speed this process, wears a do-rag, affects a Brooklyn accent, and joins a group of Haitians to sell illegal CDs and knock-off purses on Boston sidewalks and do performance art. Smith's ear for dialect and phrasing is almost pitch-perfect, so the teenagers' wildly different journeys come to life and overlap in kaleidoscopic music and sensibility, shot through with the same dilemma: what to make of their parents' failing marriage and Howard's potentially self-destructive war on Monty?
Ostensibly, On Beauty is an academic novel—an exhausted sub-genre that does not even count Smith as a fan, although she confesses a love for Pnin by Nabokov. While Smith does not wax seriously Forsterian, she releases the academic novel from the university and the confines of its ivory towers, sending it into the minds of non-intellectuals who must also cope with the corrupt but noble beast that is academia. It is a portrait of opposites who no longer attract and, against all odds and one another, like the mind and the heart, still try.
The novel is shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Award to be announced on October 10. Smith will probably not secure the coveted prize this year, not least of all because of imprecise language and wordiness at times, but rest assured she will claim it in due time. Kiki is just the beginning.
Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.
