Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors. On Beauty By Zadie Smith. 446 pp.
The Penguin Press. $25.95. SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it's Zadie Smith. Against Beauty. But of course Smith does not mean to be just to Netherland.
What troubles her is precisely that O’Neill did rise to the challenge of writing a “post-9/11 novel,” through an intelligent use of the conventional novel form. Like all the best novels inspired by September 11, Netherland treats the attacks themselves very obliquely, and thus avoids the painful literalism that afflicted John Updike’s Terrorist and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man. Briefly, it is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch financier living in New York, whose wife and child leave the city after the attacks. In his loneliness, Hans joins an amateur cricket league whose other members are all South Asian and Caribbean immigrants; and there he befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian who dreams of building a cricket stadium in New York. On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Zadie, Take Three. But I didn't want to do anything more than the lightest touch.
Sure, Howard is a Rembrandt expert, but who needs to know about Howard's expertise? That's not the most significant part of his personality. I wanted it to be light. So I tried to hold myself back. I do have a tendency to get over involved. In the endnotes, we learn that you used your husband's poetry and your brother's rap lyrics in the book. One thing that irritates me is that even with the most paltry and thin books, the book doesn't come by itself, it comes with this package of interviews, its own York Notes. Cliffs Notes. Yeah. The truth is, a book is sometimes smarter than you are and involves more people than just you.
Why don't you give interviews in the U.K.? Because I live here and I want to have a normal life. Here she is · LRB 06 October 2005. Zadie Smith on EM Forster. EM Forster's A Room With A View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you.
I felt it was very good and that the reading of it had done me some good. I loved it. I was too young, at 11, to realise serious people don't speak of novels this way. Soon enough, though, I grew up and grew serious; I became intellectually responsive to the text. And as serious young adults, we are thrilled to be able to talk of theme, of the mechanics of plot and the vicissitudes of character. A peculiar thing happens at this point. There is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy. At Cambridge at least, Roland Barthes did not fully convince my generation of readers that the text is a pleasure. The other unconscious consequence of this thinking or un-thinking, was that we believed certain styles symptomatic of certain ethical attitudes. Review: On Beauty by Zadie Smith.
On Beautyby Zadie Smith432pp, Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers.
Its principal family alone, the Belseys, comprises its own little compact multiverse of clashing cultures: the father a white English academic, the mother a black Floridian hospital administrator, one son a budding Jesus freak, the other a would-be rapper and street hustler, the daughter a specimen of US student culture at its most rampagingly overdriven. Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives ... Best Book of 2005: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty. "On Beauty" by Zadie Smith. Academic cultural critics -- who get a few taps on the snout in Zadie Smith's new novel -- often say that works of art can only be fully understood in their historical context.
It may well be that "On Beauty" feels like a revelation because it arrives toward the end of a year of uniformly drab, if occasionally accomplished novels. The chronically self-deprecating Smith would, of course, make no grand claims for her book. "On Beauty" belongs to the well-established genre of academic comic novels, and it's openly a riff on "Howards End" by E.M.
Forster, a writer she's described as her first literary love. Nevertheless, to the mere reader, plunging into "On Beauty" feels a lot like being Dorothy in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz," stepping from the black-and-white Kansas of 2005's ephemeral literary offerings and into the Technicolor of Oz.