Zadie Smith's On Beauty

Here is a write up in the Village Voice.

"That's what she's done with On Beauty, her third novel, which veers away from the flashy wit and diverse London backdrops of the first two books and instead offers an ambitiously sprawling, gentle homage to E.M. Forster's Howards End disguised as an American campus novel. Like Forster's book, it depicts the collision of two very different families: the boisterously liberal Belseys and the deeply traditionalist Kipps. Howard Belsey is a white art history professor in the throes of midlife crisis. His marriage to vibrant African American wife Kiki is collapsing, due to his unfaithfulness. And he's devoting too much psychic energy to an ideological pissing war with Monty Kipps, an Anglo-Caribbean provocateur who arrives at Belsey's elite Massachusetts university disparaging affirmative action and generally aggravating the liberal Belseys with his ultraconservative rhetoric.

Far from setting out to write an academic novel, Smith says she's not even a fan of the genre, aside from Nabokov's Pnin. 'If I had more experience in work environments, I would have chosen a different profession, but my longest experience has been in universities,' she admits sheepishly, having recently spent a year as a fellow at Harvard. Although there are plenty of sharply etched campus scenes, her goal was to follow these characters into their living rooms and explore 'the way very intelligent people occasionally mess up their personal lives.'

Smith likes messiness in literature, and it's a good thing too. On Beauty is even more entertaining and bumpy than her previous novels, crammed with characters who speak in wildly different registers and get tangled up in sex, class, and racial snares. She's currently working on a collection of essays (tentatively titled
Fail Better) in which she positively celebrates the unevenness of favorite writers. She admires, for instance, the emotional richness evoked by Forster's muddled structures and erratic creations. 'When I read novels, their failures are part of what I love about them,' she says. 'Part of the joy of them is that there's always a blind spot, and I'm interested in the way writers fail to give you what you want, even the greatest writers.'"

Interview With Be Be More Cambell

I haven't purchased this one yet but you can listen to an interview with Ms. Campbell at Black America Web's Book Club.