amazing zadie

Zadie Smith demurely and preemptively claims to be bad at writing novels. Ah, to be so unsuccessful that Michiko Kakutani pronounces your latest work "glorious" and "wonderfully engaging" is a paltry achievement indeed. It's possible to quibble with On Beauty's overly plotted march to its finale (though I found the ending of White Teeth, which gathered all the characters in an auditorium much more problematic and just plain clumsy). But then Smith is paying homage to Forster and Howard's End in On Beauty, so how can she be faulted?

I found On Beauty's story of two very different families a wildly entertaining read. At its center is the liberal Belseys helmed by an Englishman named Howard (who's a Rembrandt scholar at a fictional academy named Wellington in Boston), his African-American wife Kiki, and their three nearly grown children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi. The lives of the Belseys get entangled with those of the Kipps, a Christian, reverent bunch, headed by Trinidadian papa Monty, his sympathetic wife Carlene, their son Michael, and daughter and sexual provacateuse Victoria. What makes Zadie Smith such a joy to read is her remarkable ear for dialogue and her ability to very convincingly enter into the thoughts of her characters, whether it's a middleaged man or his teenaged daughter. She gets bonus points, too, for really capturing family dynamics. Highly recommended.