Literary Fiction · LightTwo families, one English-American and one Trinidadian-British, in a Boston-area university town grow more tangled
On Beauty
by Zadie Smith
Two academic families in a Massachusetts college town become more and more entangled
The novel follows two families in Wellington, a fictional university town outside Boston. Howard Belsey is a white English Rembrandt scholar, his wife Kiki is African-American, and their children are Jerome, Zora and Levi. Monty Kipps, a Trinidadian academic, is Howard's rival, and his family includes his wife Carlene and their children Victoria and Michael. The book opens with emails from Jerome, a newly born-again Christian, to his father. Smith has called it an "homage" to E. M. Forster's Howards End.
More about this book
Who
The Belseys, Howard, Kiki, Jerome, Zora and Levi, and the Kippses, Monty, Carlene, Victoria and Michael.
World
The fictional university town of Wellington, outside Boston.
What makes it different
It is loosely based on E. M. Forster's Howards End, and its title comes from Elaine Scarry's essay "On Beauty and Being Just."
Feel
Witty and warm. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- On BeautyWikipedia