Culture Warriors

Shortlisted in this year's Booker
prize and now being compared to EM Forster,
Zadie Smith's latest novel, On Beauty, is described as 'not
beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that
took the place of both qualities – something best described as a
profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that
she encountered in her path through life'. By Frank Rich

Some fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it's Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humour, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humour. Born in 1975 – safely past the 1960s, the birth of our blues – she's not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can't reconcile the warring camps – no one can – but On Beauty is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they'll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair.

How radical can you be?

Blame it on her youth.

Those who were enraptured by Smith's startling 2000 debut, White Teeth, will find that On Beauty is almost literally a return to form. Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial and economic diversity. This time the city is not Smith's native London but Boston, or, more specifically, the mythical outlying town of Wellington, home of a college of the same name. We are pointedly told that Wellington is not in the Ivy League, but you can herewith banish all thoughts of Brandeis and Tufts. The school's exasperating culture of entitlement, arrogance and raw ambition, as well as a character or two, will be recognisable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Harvard, where Smith did time as a Radcliffe fellow after White Teeth put her on America's map.

(She is kind enough to spare us a Larry Summers clone, however.) Clearly her stay in our Cambridge, like her years as a student in the other Cambridge back home, was fruitful, especially in this case outside the classroom.

You'd never guess she wasn't to the Adams House manner born.

"One may as well begin with Jerome's emails to his father" is the first sentence of the book, a blunt declaration of Smith's intention to pay homage to Howards End. In E M Forster's masterpiece of pre-World War I England, the collision of two antithetical families is set off by the infatuation of the young, art-worshiping Helen Schlegel with a scion of the profoundly prosaic businessman Henry Wilcox. Smith baits her own narrative mousetrap by propelling Jerome, an altruistic teenage son of Howard Belsey, a left-wing Rembrandt scholar at Wellington, into a live-in internship in London with his father's archnemesis, a reactionary and thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt and much else named Monty Kipps. Much as Forster's turn-of-the-20th-century heroine finds to her astonishment that she likes it when the Wilcoxes dismiss socialism, women's suffrage, art and literature as sheer nonsense, so Jerome Belsey discovers in the Kippses' household that he "liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream" and "thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned leftwing ideologies." What's more, Monty Kipps has a very hot daughter who doesn't necessarily abide by her famous father's publicly disseminated moral code.

The many delicious complications that ensue, not to be divulged here, compound by the page once Monty Kipps, along with his wife, Carlene, and that daughter, Victoria, move to Wellington for a visiting professorship, thus allowing Kipps and Howard Belsey to square off in ideological and personal combat against the backdrop of the continuing fratricides of a liberal university and its only slightly less liberal environs. What keeps the political conflicts from becoming didactic and predictable is, for starters, the principal characters, the Belseys and Kippses themselves. Only one of them, Howard, is white, and even he's not an American-born white man but a refugee from working class London (humble roots he has tried to escape as surely as Monty Kipps has distanced himself from his own island origins). Howard's Florida- born wife of 30 years, Kiki Simmonds Belsey, is African-American, and thus the three more or less college-age Belsey children are black, though not in all cases as black as they'd like to be. Among the novel's several contrapuntal subplots is the continuing effort of the Belsey and Kipps offspring alike to gain the friendship (platonic and not) of Carl Thomas, a Roxbury hip-hop wiz whom they worship as a fount of the "street" authenticity denied them in the hopelessly bourgeois hood of Wellington. (As a plaything for the higher classes, Carl is to Wellington's aesthetes what the lowly clerk Leonard Bast was to the Londoners of Howards End.) Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all embracing as Wellington, they allow us to view the wildly over plowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle. The boilerplate political battles that buffet the campus, whether over affirmative action or the grievances of the local Haitian community, are not as one-dimensional when both sides of the argument are taken by those who have more than a theoretical stake in the outcome. Here, as in White Teeth, Smith further lightens the load by exulting in the multicultural stew of her milieu without turning it into course work in multiculturalism.

In her Wellington and Boston, as in her London, the racial melting pot is an established fact, to be savoured and explored rather than mined for sociological morals. In On Beauty, anyone who is still arguing over it all at this late date is a bit of a dolt, oh so last century and a ripe target for farce.

That's the case with both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, both nearing 60, both handicapped by their own ideological blinders. In life, neither of them connects much to anything, including their infinitely wiser if long suffering wives, their precocious nearly grown kids and the art that is the platform for their careers as scholars. Howard's yearly seminar is a tendentious running argument against "the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art,'" in which Rembrandt is seen as "neither a rule breaker nor an original", but as "a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested." Howard's own taste runs to conceptual pieces too transgressive to be displayed in his own home. Monty, who announces his arrival at Wellington by arguing in the local paper for "taking the 'liberal' out of the Liberal Arts", reserves his greatest passion for punditry, not art, which he mainly seems to care about as a commodity. He is fond of boasting that he owns "the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island." Eventually one valuable piece in that collection, a Hyppolite painting of the voodoo goddess Erzulie treasured mainly by his wife, will become as symbolic a pawn in the two families' lives as the charismatic young interloper from Roxbury.

Smith is merciless about both Howard and Monty, the fatuous post modernist and the self satisfied capitalist alike, and it's hard to say which is more ridiculous or reprehensible.

Howard has become the kind of academic who "could identify 30 different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was". For him a rose has long since stopped being a rose but is instead "an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/ artifice". That he has "almost no personal experience of pornography" would never stop him from contributing to "a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem." So highly developed are his left-wing PC sensibilities that in his zeal to smite Monty's challenges to them he becomes the campus's foremost crusader against free speech.

But Monty is no less a hypocrite, a rigidly conservative Christian who preaches against homosexuality in public even as his best friend is a gay Baptist minister who delivered the benediction at President Reagan's inauguration. His own brand of pomposity, like Howard's, knows no bounds; he is "a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him" and has "this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative occasionally have." Kiki Belsey in particular has his number: "Often enough she spotted Monty, leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd 19th century three piece suits, with his timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating." Out of both curiosity and sympathy Kiki is soon driven to seek a friendship with Monty's elusive and mysterious wife, apotheosized by one and all from afar as "the ideal 'stay-at-home' Christian Mom". The warring academics can be insufferable, but the novel as a whole rarely sinks to their level, thanks to Smith's generous portrayal of the two families' often wounding private dramas. It's Kiki, a majestically overweight earth mother with a feminist's spine, who gives the book its biggest (but not sentimental) heart. A hospital administrator, not an academic, she is in Wellington but not of it, despite her long marriage to Howard. Along with the Belsey children – especially the ever-assertive daughter, Zora, a Wellington undergrad who emulates her father to a fault – she anchors the academic farce to a domestic reality beyond academe. As befits a farce, sex is no small part of that reality in On Beauty. However funny some of the couplings, the human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire.

Even so, the satire is not to be sneezed at.

Smith has her own droll takes on the familiar targets, whether she is dryly delineating the silken bureaucratic maneuvers of Howard's best friend, Dr Erskine Jegede, Soyinka professor of African literature and assistant director of the black studies department, or describing faculty meetings at which the priority "is to try to get a chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through". Though Smith quite rightly puts greater faith in the students than the adults who have already mucked things up, she hardly gives them a free pass. These are kids all too visibly angling for the fast track to "an internship at The New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton's Harlem offices or at French Vogue". The vestigial preppies make a brief appearance too. In one set piece, Howard eviscerates the singers in a Wellington glee club (with their "F Scott Fitzgerald heritage haircuts" and voices redolent of "Old Boston money") with such misanthropic precision that he almost (but not quite) makes you like him.

Smith is after so much in On Beauty that, as with White Teeth, not quite all of it comes together at the end. And sometimes in the later pages the stage management is all too visible, as in a climactic scene in which a political demonstration in the Wellington streets brushes against a particularly tawdry extramarital assignation for diagrammatic effect. Nor does every character have the weight of the Belseys; they intermingle with some cartoons. In her failings as in her strengths, Smith often seems more reminiscent of the sprawling 19th century comic novelists who preceded Forster than her idol himself.

But that's not always the case. What finally makes On Beauty affecting as well as comic is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to "only connect" her passions with the prose of the world as she finds it.

For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries of On Beauty, she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of culture itself.

But Smith and many of her other characters do, especially the young ones, even those who are for now held captive by their iPods. Not for nothing does On Beauty progress from an enraptured account of an open-air performance of Mozart's 'Requiem' early on to a radiant literary tour of the wonders of Hampstead Heath to the crowning image of a Rembrandt portrait being projected larger and larger in a lecture hall until the "ever present human hint of yellow" becomes an enveloping balm, however temporary, for all wounds.

Smith is roughly the same age as Forster at the time he published Howards End. No one will confuse her voice with his, but her authorial presence is at the very least a channelling of the searching heroine of that novel. Margaret Schlegel, Forster wrote, was "not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities – something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life". For all Zadie Smith's other talents, it is this quality that makes you want to follow her every step on that path.

© 2005 The New York Times