The ever-present human hint of yellow.(Fiction chronicle)(Zadie Smith's "On Beauty")

Glancing over the metaphorical shelves, one is forced to admit a certain trade deficit. Most interesting novels today seem to have been for sale in the U.K. first. Of course, generalizations are dangerous--generalizations based on national stereotypes especially so. What, after all, is true of "the French" or "the Germans"? It's touchy stuff, and it was with some trepidation that I undertook examining British novels.

Certainly Zadie Smith's return to form after a flop of a sophomore effort was widely praised. On Beauty has been much discussed, but it makes a useful beginning here. It grants us remarkable insight into the current state of British fiction (if such a thing, etc., etc.) because it lifted some motifs from Howards End. Neatly enough, Forster wrote that book over the period from 1908 to 1910: close to a century ago.

In the closing scene of On Beauty, one of her many anti-heroes, Howard Belsey, an Englishman in America, anti-Rembrandt scholar, and unfaithful husband, is giving a lecture that might, if he's lucky, rescue his career and cause the New England private college where he works to give him tenure despite the derailment of his anti-Rembrandt book. (1) At the podium, Howard discovers he has forgotten his notes. He clicks through his PowerPoint slides without saying anything, arriving at his last, Hendrickje Bathing. "Howard said nothing. Another silent minute passed. The audience began to mutter perplexedly." Howard zooms in, clicking the image larger and larger. Hendrickje's hands "were imprecise blurs" but "the rest of her skin had been expertly rendered in all its variety--chalky whites and lively pinks, the underlying blue of her veins and the ever-present human hint of yellow, intimation of what is to come".

Smith's characters are expertly portrayed, too. She can blow them up in all their chalky, whites and lively pinks. She is one of the best character writers working. The family of Belseys is deliciously described, and On Beauty is one of the few contemporary, novels that feels as if it is stuffed with fully formed people rather than tics and mannerisms.

The Belseys are a mess. Howard has hastened, if not precipitated, the disintegration of the family by having an affair with a poetry professor named Claire Malcolm. To make matters worse, his wife is 250 pounds and black and his mistress is a skinny white girl. This choice does not go over well with the wife, who feels trapped in a white world. Nor does it go over well with his naive but striving-to-be-street-savvy son Levy. "It was yet another example of his father's bizarre tastes. Where was the booty on that? Where was the rack?"

The daughter, Zora, is caught between youth and young-womanhood, a virgin, an academic overachiever. Claire--the poetess, her father's temptress--provides an excellent foil for Zora as well. Claire is talking about Virgil, "but Zora had already stopped listening. Claire's kind of learning was tiresome to her. Claire didn't know anything about theorists, or ideas, or the latest thinking. Sometimes Zora suspected her of being barely intellectual. With her, it was always 'in Plato' or 'in Baudelaire' or 'in Rimbaud', as if we all bad time to sit around reading whatever we fancied". "But after Foucault," Zora says "Where is there to go with that stuff?" This is wonderful comedy complicated further when Claire plays it against Zora, manipulating her to make a speech at a faculty meeting: "Zora's all time academic fantasy was to address the faculty members of Wellington College with a barnstorming speech", and Claire delivers the opportunity to defend the presence in Claire's class of Carl--one of the "extra students" she takes on, because "There are a lot of talented kids in this town who don't have the advantages of Zora Belsey--who can't afford college, who can't afford our summer school, who are looking at the army as their next best possibility ... an army that's presently fighting a war".

The jabs come fast, and no one is safe. One of the central pleasures of On Beauty is that these characters, while far too rich to be satirical caricatures, are all so ridiculous.