Howard Belsey is a white Englishman married to a Black American woman. He teaches art history at a fancy pants liberal arts college in Massachusetts and has been readying his Rembrandt book for publication for years with little progress. He and his wife, Kiki, have three children. Jerome, a recent convert to Christianity, is a student at Brown. His sister, Zora, is a self-serious academic type who takes after her father and is enrolled at the school were he teaches. Youngest child Levi is a wannabe tough guy embarrassed by his family’s wealth and privilege.
Howard has a couple of problems to deal with. The first is that Kiki has found out about an affair he recently conducted, although he managed to weather the storm fairly well by lying to her about the circumstances and the identity of his paramour. The second concerns his professional rival Monty Kipps, a Black British conservative whose views on art are also diametrically opposed to Howard’s. Tensions between the two families were exacerbated when Howard’s son Jerome went to work for Kipps and fell in love with his beautiful daughter Victoria. That ended horribly, and now the families are navigating both personal and professional entanglements uneasily.
Kiki, a non-academic, is struggling with her concept of self. In light of Howard’s betrayal, she is realizing how much of her life revolves around her decisions. His career has stranded her in a rich white community without many other people who look like her. Her children have mostly grown up and no longer need or want her interference in their lives. She sees an opportunity in Monty’s wife Carlene, a woman with inscrutable views on life, family, and love who is dealing with a mysterious health crisis.
Unfortunately for readers intrigued by the set up outlined above, pretty much every character involved is insufferable, both in conception and execution. Smith makes them all such extremes. Howard is incapable to saying anything clearly, his speech is bloated with academic jargon and pointless hemming-and-hawing. His children may be even worse, especially Zora and Levi, who are spoiled brats and pretentious wannabes, albeit in opposite directions. Kiki is clearly meant to be the one audiences warm to, but her personality is so sketched-in it’s hard to really relate to her.
The novel’s structure is also confusing. Both Jerome’s disastrous relationship with Victoria and his father’s initial infidelity occur completely off-the-page. The pacing is totally off. Characters disappear for long stretches of time before suddenly popping back in with life-changing information.
Smith’s prose itself is also off-putting. She is given to writing interminable paragraphs, loaded with tedious language. Her attempt at satirizing campus life feels oddly mean-spirited and spiteful instead. On Beauty is meant to be an homage to E.M. Forster’s Howards End, a book I last read about fifteen years ago. I don’t remember much about it, so perhaps that connection deepens the material in ways that I’m not getting, but for me, On Beauty was a largely joyless slog.