Zadie Smith. (2005). On Beauty. Penguin Publishing Group.

Zadie Smith. 2005. On Beauty. Penguin Publishing Group.

Zadie Smith, On Beauty. Penguin Publishing Group, 2005.

Zadie Smith. On Beauty. Penguin Publishing Group, 2005.

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4. • value: 21st century
5. • value: dysfunctional family
6. • value: social class
7. • value: literary fiction
8. • value: Adult
9. • value: Aesthetics
10. • value: family life
11. • value: African Americans
12. • value: America
13. • value: British
14. • value: contemporary fiction
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18. • value: marriage
19. • value: American
20. • value: Boston
21. • value: satire
22. • value: women
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24. • value: art
25. • value: novel
26. • value: Family relationships
27. • value: us
28. • value: Modern fiction
29. • value: African American
30. • value: multicultural
31. • value: adultery
32. • value: uk
33. • value: infidelity
34. • value: white teeth
35. • value: Interracial
36. • value: USA
37. • value: Literary
38. • value: British Literature
39. • value: British fiction
40. • value: Women Writers
41. • value: contemporary literature
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1. • role: Author
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publishDate

2005-09-13T00:00:00-04:00

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title

On Beauty

fullDescription

Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth
"In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews
Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2005
     Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful," muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century–style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry. Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth
     (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End
     . A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys—Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American—and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke—that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt—allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect
     —," but one that finds new substance here. Agent, Georgia Garett at A.P. Watt
     .

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from December 5, 2005
     This is a superb novel, a many-cultured Middlemarch
     , but it's a rough one for an actor. James juggles a large cast of Brits and Yanks, middle- and working-class white, African-American, West Indian and African men and women, as well as street teens, wannabe street teens and don't-wannabe street teens. James has a beautiful, deep voice that at first seems antithetical to Smith's ship of fools, but he enhances the humor and pathos with vocal understatement. He helps give characters their rightful place in the saga. The parade of characters swirl around two antagonistic Rembrandt scholars in a Massachusetts college town. Howard Belsey is a self-absorbed, working-class British white man married to African-American Kiki and father to three cafe-au-lait children. Monty Kipps is a West Indian stuffed-shirt married to the generous Carlene, with a gorgeous daughter, Veronica. The book is funny and infuriating, crammed with multiple shades of love and lust, midlife and teenlife crises. Class, race and political conflicts are generally an integral part of a story that occasionally strays from its center. The theme of beauty as counterpoint to individual, family, cultural and social foibles and failures ribbons through the novel and wraps it up, perhaps to say that Beauty is, finally, the only Truth. Simultaneous release with the Penguin Press hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 1)

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 15, 2005
     Issues of beauty in art and life indeed ruffle the surface of this splendid work from the author of "White Teeth". Englishman Howard Belsey teaches art history at a small New England college called Wellington; brisk daughter Zora wants to study with the celebrity poet on faculty, who is more than casually acquainted with Howard; and sensitive son Jerome's idea of healing a family rift is to take everyone to a performance of Mozart's requiem. Even rebellious Levi raps away; and Kiki, Howard's African American wife, once an activist, is now hugely overweight and struggling with her sense of self. But perhaps an even better title would have been "On Love," because it is the ties binding this family -and those coming apart -that really matter. Central to the action is both Howard's unfortunate fling and Jerome's summer adventure in London, when he falls briefly in love with the daughter of arch-conservative Trinidadian Monty Kipps, whom Howard regards as an enemy. When Monty ends up at Wellington that fall, the family map gets remade. With fully realized characters and a kaleidoscope of provocative issues, Smith has created a world you can truly enter. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ "5/15/05.] -Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

     Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 1, 2006
     Adult/High School -A hilarious comedy of manners in the tradition of Austen, Wharton, and Forster, to whom the author pays homage. She tackles class, race, and gender with acerbic wit and a wise eye for the complexities of modern life, in a 21st-century update of "Howard -s End". "Beauty" opens as hapless art historian Howard Belsey, a transplanted Englishman married to an African-American woman, returns to London to prevent his son from marrying the daughter of his academic rival, Monty Kipps. Jerome has fallen in love not just with Victoria, but with the entire family, whose Trinidadian, right-wing roots are a sharp contrast to the freewheeling liberalism of his own family. In the meantime, Belsey -s other children, social activist Zora and Levi, who speaks only street slang and fancies himself from the -hood, are each seeking the commitments and identities that will define their own lives. What results is a vivid portrait of marriage, family, the conflict between the political and the personal, and people -s eternal affinity for self-deception. Teens will enjoy this romp through the labyrinth of relationships that help a family mature and find its beautiful moments." -Pat Bangs, Fairfax County Public Library, VA"

     Copyright 2006 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2005
     Smith's first novel, " White Teeth" (2000), won prizes and comparisons to Dickens and E. M. Forster. In her current novel, she even uses a couple of plot devices from " Howard's End" to brilliant effect. The Belsey family is multicultural as well as multinational. Howard is English, teaching art history at liberal Wellington College near Boston. His wife, Kiki, is from Florida, and as practical as her husband is intellectual. Although they love each other dearly, Howard's waning career and wandering eye have caused a strain. Their children follow their own paths: Jerome is a Christian; Zora is a socially concerned intellectual; and Levi is trying to be a black man of the streets. When Jerome falls in love with the daughter of Howard's archrival, Monty Kipps, the two families are thrown together in a personal and cultural battle. Although the romance sours, Howard and Monty's rivalry kicks up a notch, while Kiki and Mrs. Kipps develop an unlikely bond. Intermingled with the analysis of family and marriage are commentaries on affirmative action, liberal versus conservative, and prejudices in many forms. This is a boisterous, funny, poignant, and erudite novel that should firmly establish Smith as a literary force of nature. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)

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"In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews
Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

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awards

1. • source: The Booker Prize Foundation
   • value: Man Booker Prize for Fiction Nominee

publisher

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   • description: Fiction / Cultural Heritage