Beautiful Zadie’s Novel Disappointingly Dense

On Sunday, in pre-dawn Austin, Kate, the waitress, set down my eggs and said: “I served her yesterday.”

“No,” I breathed, disbelieving, tracing her glance to the book on my table, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.

“Breakfast,” Kate affirmed.

At that outdoor table on the busiest street in the Texan capital, she standing, me sitting down, we bonded over our crush on the British novelist who first bewitched critics at age 23.

Smith was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard from 2002 to 2003, and the latter year Granta named her one of the top 20 young British novelists.

There is a reason why we are all in love with the idea of Zadie Smith.

It is impossible to separate her youth from her work. We hardly read at all; instead, we scan the pages for buds of potential, turns of phrase that speak of worldly experience a woman just out of her 20’s shouldn’t have. Smith, with a seemingly endless supply of talent, symbolizes our own possibilities.

If Smith awakens our desires for greatness, then her latest novel (her third, after 2000’s name-making “White Teeth” and 2002’s lukewarm “The Autograph Man”) is a test of her ambition. “On Beauty” is an homage—Smith’s term—to E.M. Forster’s 1910 opus “Howards End,” a sweeping tale of two families at ideological war, one vehemently artistic and the other all business.

Despite the Forster references, “On Beauty” could have been titled “On Harvard.” Smith names her extra-Boston Ivy “Wellington,” but it’s a see-through disguise for a school with blustery winters, dramatic faculty meetings, and a Black Studies Department nursing a beef with the administration.

But Smith, despite her year’s stay with the school, doesn’t try to be a journalist. She invents annual dinners where professors and freshmen listen to a glee club while Haitians serve chicken for a $22 flat wage. There is the Bus Stop, a restaurant that serves the same as Cafe Algiers but is embellished with basement-shaking poetry performances.

If Harvard didn’t leave a mark on Smith’s Wellington, it did shape the novel’s trajectory. She quotes Professor of English Elaine Scarry’s essay “On Beauty and Being Just” in a section opener: “A University is among the precious things that can be destroyed.”

The university and the marriage amount to the same for the Belseys, a family torn apart, far too fast, when a conservative English-Jamaican clan, the Kipps, moves into the town, the college, their sex lives.

The Belseys are an unlikely pair: Howard, a poor North London son-of-a-butcher who snagged a professorship by cutting up Rembrandt, is celebrating his 30th anniversary with Kiki, a black Floridian who escaped from her family’s servant legacy through inheritance and marriage. They made love for the first time, the two recall without irony, in Kiki’s New York walk-up, Howard’s white, gangly feet sticking out the fire escape.

Sex is one of the few things on which they agree. Kiki’s blood-and-flesh good sense overwhelms her husband’s tendencies toward the theoretical flourishes that plague academia’s brightest minds—in the fictional Wellington, of course.

But Howard is not all abstract words. He balances his sterile language by staging sensual, mid-life forays with thinner women, whose simple lives Smith seems to despise.

Howard’s final sin, enacted in a boudoir during a wake, violates so many principles, he hypothesizes, that it has no name. His sin may be unspeakable, but for Smith, the forbidden is familiar territory. She opened her first book by describing a failed suicide at a steering wheel.

But the carnality doesn’t redeem “On Beauty,” and her political message drowns out the story. Smith, like Howard, dwells on the theoretical, often for too long. In her ambition, she weighs down her novel with a little social commentary and a whole lot of rumination on the what it means to be black, and all the gradations thereof. There are the poseurs—like Levi, the youngest Belsey son, who hides an iPod under his class-erasing hoodie.

Levi attempts authenticity by hanging with Carl, a spoken-word genius straight from the city’s depths, and a gang of angry Haitians who sell knock-off Prada and CD’s, three for $10. Returning to Wellington, he sees the school: “The pristine white spires of the college seemed to him like the watchtowers of a prison to which he was returning.” Levi tries to escape, but Smith fails to specify where, and if, he finds a better home.

Despite her lofty goals, Smith’s final page grants little resolution, not at all like her first, sweeping debut which leaves you feeling like you’ve just eaten a five-course meal. She tackles too much—affirmative action, aesthetics, and that thing called love—through the eyes of too many (five, in fact), each with back stories that would occupy the better part of a novel. In her desire to emulate Forster, Smith adheres too strictly to his plotline. What could have been inspiration is simply replication.

Still recovering from her final sentence, one of those constructions meant to recall possibility and beauty and humanity all at once, I flipped through the blank excess sheets, and thought, it’s a good thing Kate the waitress hasn’t read this yet.

—Staff writer April H .N. Yee can be reached at aprilyee@fas.harvard.edu.