H Hamilton £16.99 pp446
“Only connect . . .” EM Forster famously wrote as the epigraph to his 1910 novel, Howards End. He would have been startled to see the way Zadie Smith has followed his advice. Fastening on to Howards End, her new novel On Beauty takes over and makes over its characters, plot patterns, themes, situations and phrases.
From street-savvy youths in hoodies to academics bristling with postmodern theory, 21st-century types stream across Smith’s pages. “This isn’t 1910,” a character is made to snap. But, constantly, On Beauty harks back to Forster’s Edwardian masterpiece. Howards End’s studiedly casual opening line, “One may as well begin with Helen’s letters to her sister”, gets restyled as “One may as well begin with Jerome’s e-mails to his father.” An awkward mix-up over an umbrella is updated to an awkward mix-up over a Discman. Forster’s south London clerk shabbily excluded from the cultural establishment becomes a black American rapper.
Happenings in Howards End — a false-start engagement and its ensuing embarrassments, a Christmas-shopping expedition, a trip to the country that gets no further than the railway station, a sudden friendship, an unexpected funeral, a suppressed bequest — are replicated. Forster’s fey description of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony performed in London’s Queen’s Hall is paralleled by a fey description of Mozart’s Requiem performed on Boston Common (where Forster hears elephants and goblins in the music, Smith hears apes and mermaids). Through both books runs a mesh of tensions and attachments between two families who embody — liberal v conservative — opposing attitudes and ideologies.
All but daubed with highlighter pen, On Beauty’s reworkings of Howards End aren’t difficult to spot for readers clued up on Forster (others will be understandably bemused by some of the book’s far-fetched twists and turns). What is harder to see is their purpose. Smith’s preface speaks of offering “hommage” to Forster. But cannibalising one of his novels, giving its components a gaudy respray and recycling them into what turns out to be a ramshackle vehicle for an ill-sorted heap of concerns seems a curious way of going about this.
Despite its commandeering of the framework of Howards End, On Beauty isn’t any more successful than its predecessors, White Teeth, 2000 (which borrowed plentifully from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses) and The Autograph Man, 2002 (which was sizeably indebted to Martin Amis’s Money), in curbing Smith’s taste for meandering as her whimsy takes her. Initially focused on the households of two rival academics — Howard Belsey, a white English art historian of radical bent, and Monty Kipps, a black art historian and reactionary campaigner against PC pieties — the narrative soon strays away from this set-up. Zigzagging about, Smith seems unable to decide what kind of novel she wants to write: a campus satire, an amused survey of north London and East Coast American lifestyles, a study of infidelity and its hurts (after 28 years of happy marriage, Howard has been unfaithful to his wife Kiki), a jaunty celebration of youth culture, an exploration of the relationships between beauty and power, creativity and criticism, experience and analysis, or a conscience-pricking portrayal of the gulf between the pampered existences of affluent American blacks and the exploited plight of Third World blacks, especially Haitian refugees who, as cleaners, drivers and street-peddlers, form a populous underclass in this book.
Skimming inconsequentially around among this medley of material, On Beauty fails to get a satisfactory purchase on any of it.
Slackness of grip lets inconsistencies slip past. With her penchant for the arrestingly unusual statement, Smith declares that Howard’s mistress finds him “a man for whom she had no sexual desire whatsoever”. If so, it’s hard to understand why their affair is exposed because she can’t keep her hands off him at a party. There are some beautifully caught visual effects (sunlight through green glass spreads “a dreamy pasture” on the floorboards of an old house, covers of DVDs laid out for sale on a sidewalk look like “a patchwork quilt knitting together a zillion computer-generated colours”), but images often go awry. Glimpsed in a locker room, a woman is said to have pubic hair that is “very long and straight and grey, like dead grass”. But dead grass isn’t grey; it’s brown. At another point, we hear how “the democratic East Coast snow was still falling, making the garden chairs the same as the garden tables and plants and mail-boxes and fence-posts”. Momentarily attention-catching, the image rapidly melts into meaninglessness.
Since the things it falls on keep their differing shapes, the “democratic East Coast snow” can’t make them the same — and, of course, snow in even the most undemocratic zones of the globe would have a similar effect.
Inability to sustain tone is a more widely disabling handicap. Characterised as “soft and open, with a liberal susceptibility to the pain of others . . . overwhelmed by the evil men do to each other”, Howard and Kiki’s younger son Levi reflects about Haiti: “there’s this little country, a country real close to America that you never hear about, where thousands of black people have been enslaved, have struggled and died in the streets for their freedom, have had their eyes gouged out and their testicles burned off, have been macheted and lynched, raped and tortured, oppressed and suppressed and every other kind of pressed”. The grating segue from the catalogue of sickening atrocities to the careless flippancy of “every other kind of pressed” epitomises Smith’s main limitation as a novelist: her desire to appear smart at all costs. Her default mode is hip. Cuteness is a lure she can’t resist. The door of her fiction is permanently ajar to the cool, offbeat and oddball. Physical freakishness and zany quirks are what readers will remember of many of her characters (such as a lecturer who repetitively burbles about the virtues of “pah-point” presentation). Even Kiki, who looms corporeally large in these pages — she weighs in at 250lb and her obesity is a frequent topic — seems fairly substanceless when it comes to psychological and emotional believability. Significantly, the novel’s most engaging feat of characterisation (shambling, mumbling, well-intentioned Levi) is the one where it pulls most free from its self-consciously bookish background.
Elsewhere, the sense of arch appropriation and coy literary cross-reference can be cloying. A poem, also called On Beauty, by Smith’s husband Nick Laird is skittishly presented as the work of a campus poetess. Disguised allusions to other authors’ works are knowingly spliced into Smith’s prose. Ultimately, all they do is thicken the atmosphere of self- indulgent waywardness that has suffused the book by the time she reaches her Howard’s end.
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £15.29 on 0870 165 8585
