Book Review: On Beauty

I purchased this book but haven't gotten around to cracking it open yet. I loved Zadie Smith's White Teeth so am looking forward to reading On Beauty. In the meantime, here is a good review to pique your interest.

On Beauty," loosely modeled after E.M. Forster's "Howard's End," has been described as "that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century." It is set in a fictional New England college town and follows the lives of the families Belsey and Kipps. The Belsey family includes Howard (a White British Rembrandt unenthusiast and professor at our fictional Wellington University), his wife, Kiki (a Black American hospital administrator originally from Florida who, in her later years, is starting to look more and more like she's from the south everyday (read: getting pretty fucking fat)), the oldest son, Jerome (a well-intentioned Geek Boy who, while smart and sweet and caring and all that, will undoubtedly spend his entire adult life being mocked and scoffed at by pretty women), Zora (the fat know-it-all daughter who you're never quite able to feel sorry for...no matter what fucked up thing happens to her), and Levi (the classic Black (or in this case, biracial) Middle Class kid who rejects his Middle Class Privilege and tries to pretend that he's from the fucking gutter ghetto because he thinks that being poor and isolated and "hustling" is the definition of being Black - what a fucking douche).

And then we have the Kippses, a Wealthy Ultra-Conservative Black British Family of West Indian heritage. Monty Kipps, a conservative academic and rival to Howard Belsey, is against affirmative action and other social programs that seek to provide special benefit to undereducated and ill-prepared minorities simply because they happen to be impoverished. And before we go any further, let me just say that I agree with some of what this guy has to say on this issue. But that's another post for another day I suppose. So anyway, I won't go into detail about the members of Monty's family, primarily because I just don't feel like it. But I guess you should be introduced to Victoria, Monty's college-aged daughter. You need to be familiar with Victoria, not because she's terribly interesting, but because she's a big ole slut. And I am of the opinion that everyone has a right to know when there's a big ole slut in the room. Anyhoo.

"On Beauty" manages to successfully tackle such complex issues as black middle class guilt (the stupidest thing ever!), the often ridiculous idealization of ghetto existence by those outside of the ghetto (I stand corrected, this is the stupidest thing ever!), the subtle and not so subtle difficulties that arise in an aging marriage, and the ludicrous hypocrisy that usually accompanies both extreme liberalism and extreme conservatism.