On Beauty

by Zadie Smith
Review by Meredith McKinnie

“The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

Howard is an untenured university professor in the midst of a mid-life crisis. The white patriarch of his mixed family, he struggles to understand who he is and where he belongs in this familial microcosm of his own creation. His wife Kiki, once a standout black bombshell, is now a hundred pounds heavier and emotionally wiser. Once enamored by her husband who wowed her with his intellect, she now sees the smallness of a man struggling with his identity so late in the game when she is just now coming into her own. The story begins at the couple’s 30th anniversary party, where the elite of the college town have gathered to celebrate Howard and Kiki Berger, the twosome hanging on by a thread after Howard’s recently confessed indiscretion. After ten years at his current institution, Howard is still trying to prove himself to his colleagues and rededicate himself to his marriage. 

The plot is intensified by the Berger’s three adult children: Jerome, Zora, and Levi. Jerome is recently back in the states after a summer sojourn in Britain where he stayed at the home of Howard’s professional nemesis, an uber-conservative fellow academic named Monty Kipps. Zora is a freshman at Wellington College, where Howard works, and is also struggling with who she is and how she feels. Levi, still in high school, cozies up to the street crowd, ashamed of his privileged background and determined to make it without the benefit of a higher education. The Bergers adore their children and appear more in love with the family they’ve created than with each other. The familiarity of a multi-decade relationship with constructed walls begins to seem empty when the children begin living more outside the home than under their thumbs. When Monty Kipps comes to Wellington College and threatens the liberal environment Howard thrives in, the two families find themselves both at odds and intrinsically intertwined. Smith explores the themes of fidelity, identity, betrayal, and self-awareness. 

Zadie Smith is one of those cool, uber-intellectual authors whose construction of a mere sentence sends many accomplished authors swooning. She writes the way the best writers wish they could. Her novels blend compelling characters, subdivided plots, and social commentary seamlessly. She forces readers to engage, to think for themselves, about the story and more poignantly about life, and invest fully into each of her narratives. While many of her stories are set in her native Britain, On Beauty is set in the northeastern United States, though one of the main characters hails from the UK. Zadie Smith is an accomplished writer, a darling among book critics, a modern woman and author intent on speaking about the lives rarely examined so vividly up close. On Beauty won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006.