Echoes of E.M. Forster
MAITREYEE SAHA GANAPATHY
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Like Howard's End, Smith's book too scrutinises personal relationships, conflicting values, behaviour and human imperfection.
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On Beauty, Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton, price not stated.
THIS October, Zadie Smith turned 30 years and three novels old. Five years ago, she had burst into the literary scene with White Teeth, a novel that won several prizes as the best first book. This was followed by Autograph Man, which appeared in 2002. Shortly after, she was named among the 20 best British young writers by Granta.
But the hype left her cold and complaining about the "psychological pressure" it put on a writer. "Not that anyone should weep for a writer who has earned loads of money. But the bottom line is this is not a healthy thing to have in your head at eight in the morning when you're trying to write something. It's just very messy," she is reported to have said at interviews.
Besides writing Smith is also known to tap dance like a professional and sing jazz well enough to earn money through it. Added to this, her incredible good looks had the media serenading her wherever she went.
This year, her third book, On Beauty, made it to the Man Booker shortlist. Even when you cut out the hype, she still looks like the most exciting package that has arrived at the doorstep of modern English literature. Alison Owen and Scott Rudin, the latter of "The Hours Fame", are already set to film the novel, On Beauty, for FilmFour.
Complexities of life
But, to speak of On Beauty. Smith has been an admirer of E.M. Forster since the age of 11 when she first read A Room With A View. By her own admission, all her works have been influenced by Forster in one way or another. On Beauty bases its structure on Forster's immensely popular Howard's End. Forster's style, which was far from controlled and precise, revealed and reflected the complexities of human nature and life itself. There are no clear beginnings and endings. More often, there are sudden unexplained stops or just trailing offs. "There is no final murder... " as Zadie would like to put it.
Like Howard's End, Smith's book too scrutinises personal relationships, conflicting values, behaviour and human imperfection. It weaves in issues of race, class and, in a small measure, the opposing ideals of the Conservative and the Liberal, through the families of Belseys and Kipps (much like Schlegels and Wilcoxes of Howard's End) and the small university town of Wellington where they live. The academia itself gets a few knocks as Smith pursues the idea of beauty and those who negate it.
Howard Belsey is a Professor of Art, a hard-boiled 57-year-old academic. He is a Liberal and strongly supports Affirmative Action. Howard is married to Kiki Simmonds, an African-American, who works as a hospital administrator. They have been married for 30 years and have three teenage children, Jerome, Zora and Levi whose coming-of-age we are witness to as the story progresses.
On the other hand are the Kipps. Sir Monty Kipps, a black Englishman, is an intellectual and a popular public figure. He is a staunch Conservative and an academic adversary of Howard. Kipps has published a hugely popular book on Rembrandt whereas Howard's book on the same subject is nowhere near finishing.
For Howard, trouble really begins when Monty Kipps is invited by the Humanities Department of Wellington College and comes to live in his neighbourhood. His daughter, the exotic Veronica with whom Jerome had had a brief love affair, enrols as a student at the college.
The Belsey house is in constant turmoil — each one of the members has a story unfolding. Central to the story is Howard's infidelity and his failing marriage. It is a complex matter because Howard truly loves his wife and his transgressions are perplexing even to himself. There is nothing muddling about Kiki though. She has her doubts and misgivings but it is exactly that which gives her an openness with which she can sympathise and embrace the world.
Insider's view
Then there is the university with its academics — Smith sketches this world with the familiarity of an insider. She writes about the academic world with much better insight and wit than she does about a complex marriage. Like Elaine Scarry, Smith too seems to believe that education's basic work is to guide our gaze to beauty. "One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet suddenly cuts through a certain patch of sky." Elaine Scarry's slim publication, On Beauty and Being Just is one of the inspirations for Smith's book.
It is the young people she seems to understand and empathise with most — whether it is the precocious Zora, naοve Jeremy, hip-hop artiste Carl or Levi or even Katie Armstrong, a significant though minor character. Levi, who never appears without his I-pod, wears a doo-rag and gets involved with a group of Haitians selling pirated CDs and fake designer bags, is the most lovingly portrayed of all. It is through Levi that issues of race, Black identity and America's growing neo-conservatism are touched upon.
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