Zadie Smith's On Beauty Book Review

One of the beauty of living in this modern world is that it has the potential to become truly modern. Our territorial and racial boundaries are getting blurred, our understanding of the complexity of existence has increased and we are thinking of creative ways to solve our living situations. However, there are challenges of communication that happen between any two individuals, even those who love each other. And the challenge increases manifolds when it is a meeting of culture. But that is exactly what is happening in big metro cities all around the world. The writer of this novel comes from one such city, London, and herself comes from a multiethnic family.

Zadie Smith’s On Beauty is a novel that combines the best of both worlds. It retains all the beauty of the novel form yet it manages to create something new, to capture the zeitgeist. It could simply have been a novel dealing with the complexity of a mixed race family but instead it manages to explore the many dimensions that are outside it or are interlaced in it.

In Zadie Smith’s world, there is, mindless hours of television watching, time spent on the internet, and cellphones. The Belsey world has many identities like many of us today have. The children are coloured, but they have a white father, they are Americans, yet there is an English connection. Their mother, like any other mother of this era, is more than little concerned with her weight issues, and struggles in her post-menopausal phase. And the frivolous attitude of the young towards sex, are all but invisible, thanks to the market forces of the consumerist world.

The novel opens with a series of email sent by the son to his father, to which the father has not been responding. The tone is such that we assume that it is nothing but the generation’s aversion to modern technology. At the end of the series, the mother discovers, in the screensaver mode, (not the classic letter found lying on the table, ha!) that her son is to go get married to the professional rival of her husband. This leads to much anxiety within the family.

The titular beauty of the novel isn't just the seeking of physical beauty, but also a search for beauty in the complexity of circumstances. It is human nature to seek harmony and beauty in life, it is just that we are all bound to seek it in different places, which is what creates the tiff in close relations, just as it does with the Belseys. 

If this is the first of your Zadie Smith novels, you will definitely be interested in exploring more of  this Orange Prize winner.