3.5 disco balls

Published: June 4, 2005 by Penguin Books
Category: Contemporary Fiction

On Beauty by Zadie Smith is 442 pages. A very, very slow 442 pages in which you need to be fully engaged and present while reading. This is not a book you can breeze through, as the book would mention of certain characters: it is intellectual. There is no doubt that Smith is a talented writer, I just struggled a bit in establishing a reading pace with this one.

On Beauty follows the Belsey family: an interracial couple, Howard and Kiki, married thirty years living in an upper middle class town with their three children, Jerome, Zora and Levi.

• Howard is an art history professor at a local liberal arts college who is hard to like; he always has an opinion (its most always negative) and he’s always right (or so he thinks)
• Kiki used to be a beautiful spitfire but has gained a significant amount of weight; still a spitfire but that magnetic confidence doesn’t exude from her like it used to (I blame Howard)
• Jerome is a young man trying to find himself in religion and grapples with adulthood and his relationship with his family; he is the rational one of the bunch
• Zora is Howard 2.0 with the spunk of Kiki; she yearns to be accepted but her approach in getting what she yearns for is more alienating than endearing
• Levi is sixteen and going through an identity crisis; he is passionate and loyal and trying to find something worth fighting for (his family doesn’t understand him – as any teenager would say)Read More »