Customer Reviews

On Beauty

5 star:		(54)
4 star:		(64)
3 star:		(30)
2 star:		(50)
1 star:		(26)

 

 

This book has its moments-- bits of lovely writing, occasional insightful moments, some good laughs. It wasn't a page turner, but I'm not sorry I read it. The book also has a lot of problems, and they distract from the reading experience. The most noteable problem, is, as others have pointed out, the terrible and terribly overdone dialect. The southern graduate student's speech is ridiculous and laughable. Levi's is as well-- and I'm giving smith credit here by assuming it was supposed to be bad dialect, a middle class black american kid emulating slang, but it fails to accurately capture that. Levi speaks like no person in the history of ever, and would be laughed out of his house AND off of any street corner. Moreover, the characters never really come to life-- and this was a book about types I recognized and wanted to like. The Belsey's feel like walking lessons, and fall into cliche. Their feelings are never clear unless they're explicity telling you why they are the way they are. For a while, the sweeping tone of the book and frequent point of view shifts distract from this, but eventually you want a character to hold onto, and there isn't one. The Kipps' are even worse, seeming to exist solely as foils for the Belsey's. Their conservatism and Christianity are so shallow and underutilized from the begining that the subsequent exposure of hypocrisy doesn't pack any sort of punch. No one feels fully imagined. Characters can state a worldview or a self perception, but when all of the characters have to explicitly announce their politics and purposes all the time, it's a problem. More problematically, the pivotal scene of the book isn't really written. It's as if Smith got to the book's climax, realized it was already at least a hundred pages too long, and rushed the ending. Kiki's deciscion never feels real, and the final scene seems to indicate that there's been a good deal of forgiveness on the part of the children, something that seems unlikely.

I'm not sure that this book would be great even with better editing and dialogue. I think we've gotten to the point in literature where we pat an author on the back for even bothering with the "big questions." This book isn't really telling us anything new, and it seems confused about what it wants its reader to take away. Ok, beauty standards are varied, and in one way or another dominate women's lives. Pretty girls have problems because they're too pretty and ugly girls have problems because they're not pretty enough. OK... and? It's amazing that in a book about appearances, we never know what anyone looks like, aside from basic physical shape. What does Zora look like, beides big? Why is it that Kiki still gets hit on in black neighborhoods, even with the extra weight, but Zora is invisible to the opposite sex? What does it mean that Victoria isn't just a pretty girl, she's a pretty, dark-skinned black girl in a world where that's still often seen as a rarity or contradiction? Is her sexuality a rebellion against her family,and if so why does she side with them in key deciscions? Race creates identity issues, especially when mixed with class issues... and? This books doesn't tell us anything new about middle class kids trying to pass themselves off as poor, or interracial families having racial tension. It's not enough to have provocative material, or to have big issues-- you've still got to do something with them, and this book really doesn't.

Other reviewers have covered most of what I consider problematic about this book. What bothered me most was that Kiki is a black, Southern woman with absolutely no connection to any black Southern woman I've known or seen. Other reviewers have criticized Smith for her inauthentic dialogue. The inauthenticity extends beyond the dialogue. Smith knows little to nothing about black Southerners. Her description of "soul food," in the book is unrecognizable to any "soul food" emanating from the South. When she has Kiki reverting to her Southern roots, her dialogue, culture, etc. are markedly more Caribbean instead of Southern. The Belsey children speak slang that is Caribbean, not Southern. To some, this may be a minor point, but since Kiki's Florida roots are a central part of her character, that they weren't authentic is troubling.

A sabbatical in New England does not make Smith an authority able to accurately critique American culture, especially black-American culture.

I just finished reading "On Beauty" after several friends recommended "White Teeth" and I found Smith to be an enormously talented writer who does not humanize her characters. It is hard to say that she does not flesh them out, we do hear their voices but we cannot relate to them except as objects of Smith's satire. There is nothing wrong with writing a purely satirical work but she is trying for something more here and it does not work. After introducing her characters we are ready to enjoy their humor, their failures, their triumphs and eventually their redemptions but, alas, the book ends on a note of cheap revenge that is decidedly unpleasant. She makes some attempts to honor these characters but Smith's basic cynicism does not allow her to do so. I believe Smith believes she is transcending stereotypes by portraying a mixed race marriage and young black intellectuals. Why is it then that Howard, a white, working class man ultimately fails in his dream career and as a family man, that a beautiful, smart black student is portrayed as a sexual predator destroying lives around her. Did Smith so hate her time in America that she has her character Victoria destroy so many lives from the minute she lands here? And on and on with each character whether black or white. One wants to like these characters but she just wont let us. Two scenes I did think were brilliant - the way Claire, the teacher of poetry interacts with her students especially during their evening at The Bus Stop, and the department head making introductory remarks at a faculty meeting with a one line cameo appearance by Smith herself.

Ultimately, this is a mean book with mean characters that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth. I would have given it one star only that Zadie Smith is a brilliant writer. I would say to her "channel your anger, give us believable characters that we can care about". Zadie Smith needs to grow up.

It's almost impossible to dislike Zadie Smith's writing because she's very funny and has a fine handle on character; still, there were so many strange flaws in this novel I kept commenting on them out loud with the friend with whom I was travelling while I read Smith's third novel. She seems to misunderstand entirely the way the American tenure system in private colleges works (it is impossible Howard Belsey would have the institutional authority and privileges he has and yet be untenured), and she also seems to have done little research on things as simple as American labor laws (a major subplot about one of the characters being forced to work by a megastore on Christmas Day is another impossibility in the US). And her re-working of many of the basic plot points of Forster's HOWARDS END are simply unnecessary, and force Smith to create all kinds of plot contrivances to allow the truth of Mrs. KIpps's bequest to come to light. The novel is most valuable as a study in character, and here Smith does not fail to delight: the characters of Howard, Kiki, and Zora Belsey are so funny and finely drawn that even with all the errors and elaborate plotting coincidences I've still recommended this book to others already. Yet it is a bit of a puzzle why by her third novel Smith should be making such elementary errors in her plotting research.

In many ways, On Beauty is similar to White Teeth. It's laugh-out-loud funny and contains marvelous descriptive passages. In the end, however, the similarities the novel bears to White Teeth work against it. Reading On Beauty, I got the feeling that I'd already experienced much of what unfolds. And I had--in White Teeth. For example, a character named Jerome falls in love with another family in the same vein in which Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal fall in love with the Chalfens. Zora, by the way, seems nothing more than a smarter version of Irie. Also, Smith describes the beauty of Zora's love interest, Carl, in the same manner she describes Millat's beauty. And, as in White Teeth, On Beauty's religious characters prove themselves hypocritical. But the similarities don't end there. In, On Beauty, Smith even borrows a line she devoted several paragraphs to in White Teeth--"What you looking at?" While Smith's commentary surrounding this question is hilarious in White Teeth, it should have been left out of On Beauty.

The novel's similarity to White Teeth does not ruin it. Its many flaws do, though.

The dialogue is disastrous. At one point Roxbury resident Carl asks Zora, "Am I meant to be grateful?" This is a British phrasing. An American would say, "Am I supposed to be grateful?"

Smith particularly fails at her attempt to incorporate Black English Vernacular into the text. Sometimes she nails it, as is the case when a character named Levi asks, "Where they at?" Other times, she stumbles, such as when Levi asks, "Who you on the phone to?" "Who you talking to?" or "Who you on the phone with?" should have been used instead. Also, an abundance of black characters say "I be." This wouldn't sound strange coming from an old black Southerner, perhaps, but, coming from young blacks, it does. Even uneducated young black urbanites speak a more standard form of English than this. Even the blacks on UPN shows speak a more standard form of English than this. Then there's Kiki, a middle-aged black woman with Florida roots, who speaks consistently inconsistently. At the beginning of the book, she tells her husband, Howard, "Your life is just an orgy of deprivation." But later she remarks that the sun "done set." It's unlikely that the same speaker would have birthed both lines. I was similarly startled when Carl, an uneducated rapper, who utters sentences such as, "I be a college a man now," has no difficulty writing lengthy papers for the music department of upper-crust Wellington College.

Often, the black American characters are stereotypes. All of the women have large breasts and backsides and use the words "baby" and "honey" gratuitously. At one point we meet LaShonda, a young woman who calls Levi "baby" a half-dozen times in the span of two pages. Of course a girl with a "ghetto" name such as LaShonda must not only have a "big old booty," she must also be an unwed mother of three on the prowl for a new baby daddy. It's also apparent that Smith believes all black Americans refer to each other as "brother" or "sister." Maybe during the Black Power Movement. Not in 2005.

Kiki's weight is also problematic. While Howard cites Kiki's 250-pound frame, in part, for his adultery, black urban men won't stop hitting on her. Shapeliness is said to be valued in black culture, yes, but 250 pounds is not shapeliness, it's morbid obesity. Reading On Beauty I am puzzled as to why celebs such as Star Jones and Oprah Winfrey weren't sex symbols in the black community when they were at their heaviest. There's also the fact that there are no consequences for Kiki's weight gain. In real life, middle-aged, overweight black women suffer from hypertension, diabetes, joint-pain, back pain, etc. Kiki, on the other hand, does yoga.

The novel includes other inaccuracies about black Americans. At one point, Kiki says, "We got black kids dying on the front line..., and they're in that army 'cos they think college has got nothing to offer them." Actually, the military's promise to pay college tuition is the main reason young people of all races, blacks included, enlist.

Smith's description of Kiki's and Carl's palms is also wrong. The two are described as having rich-brown palms. Blacks, even dark-skinned ones, have palms that fall into the pinkish-beige range. Smith makes the opposite mistake when describing Kiki's areolas, which she describes as pinkish brown. In fact, a dark-skinned black woman would have dark brown areolas.

While not all of what Smith writes is wrong, it isn't necessarily good. She uses an abundance of adverbs and adjectives, many repeatedly. How often can someone be called fatuous? There are also redundancies such as, "He nodded mutely" and non sequiturs such as, "Kiki restrained herself. Instead she opened her purse and began searching through it for her lip-gloss." Huh? Instead of what?

Character development is also lacking. Choo, the main Haitian character, is nothing more than Smith's mouthpiece. His sole purpose is to inform the reader about Haiti's plight. Then there's Victoria Kipps. Worshipped for her beauty, Kipps turns out to be a walking cliche. She may be stunning, but, guess what, she's dumb! She may be promiscuous, but, guess what, she's easy because sex is all men want from her. Sigh. Katherine Armstrong, a character who makes an inexplicable cameo (as does Helen Keller), is eerily similar to Lee Fiora, the protagonist of Curtis Sittenfeld's novel, Prep. Like Lee, Katie is from South Bend, Ind. There, she was the brightest kid in town. But, surrounded by New England preppies at Wellington, Katie is overwhelmed and, thus, painfully shy. Ring any bells? It's also problematic that Smith features other minor characters such as Doc Brown, her rapper-brother's stage name in real life. This choice uproots readers from the fictional world and places them into the real one. The same thing happens when the reader encounters a poem written by Smith's husband mid-novel. The rap lyrics and poetry used in the novel should reflect the characters who authored them. How can this occur if Smith gives fictional characters credit for verse composed by real people? This move also led Smith to make another mistake. When Carl recites the lyrics of Smith's real-life brother, he refers to Mc Donald's as Macca D's. No one in the States calls McDonald's Macca D's. Amercians say Mickey D's.

In closing, read On Beauty if you're a Zadie Smith fan or if you'd like to see how she tweaked Howard's End. Don't read it because you've heard it's a good book. At best, it's mediocre. I give it two-and-a-half stars.

I read so many glowing reviews of this book that I couldn't wait to read it myself. I hadn't read Zadie Smith's other book but I knew that it, too, was well-acclaimed. This book was really hard for me to finish, so I didn't. That doesn't happen to me very often. I try to give any book enough of a chance that I'll keep reading to the end. In this case, I didn't care enough about any of the characters to keep going. All of the characters left me feeling indifferent at best, except perhaps for Kiki and Levi. I can appreciate books that are slow-moving; I don't read many mainstream pulp novels and was a literature minor in college. But this book moved so slowly that I just couldn't get into it. If I had felt something - anything at all - for the characters, maybe I could have.

I agree with the other reviewer who said that the book really should have been set in England. I had to keep checking back to make sure, because it really did not ring true to real American life to me. The tone of the book seemed much more British. Because of that, I think there were some inconsistencies in the book that contributed to the reason I found it so difficult to read. I don't honestly understand why so many people have rated this book so well. To me it was just pretentious and unjustifiably long-winded, and with characters I didn't find especially compelling.

Zadie Smith may have bitten off more than she can chew with "On Beauty." An examination of families, academia, race, class, infidelity, truth, and, ostensibly, beauty, the novel is wide ranging yet lacks a cohesive center. Smith relies heavily on dialogue that is unrealistic, clunky, and detracts from both the narrative threads and character development. Her grasps of American English is tenuous at best, especially her portrayal of "street" talk and even her use of academic language. Furthermore, her characters' voices lack consistency and constantly contradict themselves in tone and cadence. That said, the plot is fairly engaging, in particular the story line that follows Harold Belsey through a mid-life crisis. Perhaps in the future Smith should stick to a world that she knows and understands, as well as employ an adequate copy editor. For an intelligent and witty look at academic life and marital relationships, I heartily recommend Richard Russo's "Straight Man."

I was hugely disappointed with "On Beauty" after being blown away with Smith's debut "White Teeth". I was certain that she was the UK's new wunderkind.

Many of the storylines lagged with soggy prose and inconsistent characterisation. Who are these people? We get to the end of this book not really knowing the essence of these characters. Too many of the characters are unlikeable. Not helpful for one who is desperately trying to like a book.

I was also concerned with the amount of typos. I am a shameless stickler when it comes to this and was horrified to find so many mistakes. Where were the editors?

It's not all bad, though. There are some beautifully written and hilarious moments throughout this book. The overall picture for me, however, was that of a boring effort and one which did not deserve to be shortlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize.

After having read "White Teeth" a few years ago, I was anticipating another novel of similar caliber. What a disappointment!

While she acknowledges up front that it is written as an hommage to E.M. Forster- the storyline is needlessly convoluted in order to mirror the plot of "Howard's End". What's worse are the underdeveloped, frustratingly shallow and across the board uninteresting characters- at the end of the book the reader doesn't particularly care what happens to any of them. I gather the intent was to examine personal relationships through the lens of larger scale issues of class, race, gender and aesthetic- but to say that she falls short is a gross understatement. It just feels so contrived- the dialogue- the meandering plot- the lifeless characters- all of it. This is definitely not a novel that will transport you into the story. It was a complete waste of time to read (I am kicking myslf for buying it in hardback)-and such a let-down after having read Ms. Smith's other work.

I am not sure at all why this book became as hyped as it did, but I can't agree with the over-assessment of it. There is much talent here, and an energetic cast of characters but it strikes me as false, and lacks alot of depth. Perhaps I am wrong, but I just couldn't understand why it was lauded. Smith seems to stay on the surface and this is always interesting and lively, but it isn't a work of literary brilliance, though highly entertaining (which is alot in itself). I wouldn't have minded if it had just been noted as such.