Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is a novel about family, art, and class but mostly, it’s about the exquisite awkwardness of believing in ideas that no longer seem to work.
“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”
Have you ever met someone who says one thing but does the opposite? Probably every second person in your life. Sometimes, I think that’s what Zadie Smith talks about in On Beauty.
Inspired by E.M. Forster’s Howards End, On Beauty maps a feud between two academic families : the Belseys (liberal, chaotic, interracial, barely holding it together) and the Kippses (conservative, Caribbean, performatively upright). But like all good rivalries, the lines blur quickly: children swap places, parents betray ideals, and everyone eventually says something unforgivable in a seminar room.
What I found most ironic, or who to be precise, is Howard Belsey, the Rembrandt scholar who detests Rembrandt. He is working on a book titled Against Rembrandt. He lectures on beauty in a way that seems as if he is actively speaking against it. He says in the book:
“She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.”
His wife, Kiki, is the moral center here, a woman who is constantly overlooked, and who sees more than anyone else. Here, identity becomes a game of posturing; art becomes hollowed out by theory, and the younger generation tries (and mostly fails) to make sense of love, race, and power.
I mean Zadie Smith is so skilled at portraying hypocrites in a way that you still find them likable because life is hard. Most of the people we meet are all human hypocrites with a realness which you can’t blame them for. What Forster did with property, Smith does with aesthetics. It raises important questions such as what it means to inherit something? A belief, a painting, a way of thinking, especially when that inheritance embarrasses you?
“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful…and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
Zadie Smith’s trick is that she lets her characters fail and then lets them keep living anyway. That’s the beauty, and the joke. I liked how messy and unresolved the ending is. It definitely feels real.
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Contributed by
Aashisha
