Since sophomore year, I have maintained that my biggest regret in college is not seeing Zadie Smith speak. Reading “On Beauty,” Smith’s 2005 novel, has only made this regret sharper. The novel explores the insular community of a college campus. Based outside of Boston, the novel centers on the Belsey family and their interactions with another family, the Kipps. Howard Belsey is a white professor from the U.K. who is married to an African American woman, Kiki. Their three children, all within their mid-teens and twenties, explore the complexities of being of mix-race, magnified by the white, wealthy suburb they live in. The Kipps family comes into the town of Wellington, where the college is located, because Monty Kipps is coming in as a visiting professor. Monty Kipps is considered Howard Belsey’s true enemy, as he strongly disagrees and fights against Howard’s liberal views.
The novel was unexpectedly relevant to many of the questions and issues that are surrounding the Colorado College campus culture.
When I remembered that this novel was written in 2005, it was interesting to see that the same arguments about free-speech and diversified perspectives are still incredibly relevant today.
Zadie Smith writes about the ways in which faculty interact and share ideas with sharp and realistic dialogue. She stays so true to the ways people speak that it becomes a bit distracting—the sentences of dialogue are filled with breaks and ellipses. But at its best, the relationships between her characters are endearing and frustrating; I read into the family dynamic as if it was my own.
The different loyalties and betrayals found in a family history are brought to the forefront of this story, over and over again. These are amplified and made public by the Belsey’s presence on a college campus. Smith reflects the dramatic and gossiping tendencies of college students onto the faculty members. The faculty of Wellington are more involved in campus happenings than students, and the eloquence and intelligence they exhibit whilst gossiping or having an affair or picking a fight only makes it more entertaining.
“On Beauty” is not one of Smith’s most popular books, but it is entertaining and especially provocative when considering our own college environment (the liberal landscape of academia), the relationship between race and family, and the ways in which families can hurt each other.