Zadie Smith-- On Beauty

     This is my first encounter with Zadie Smith and I have to say that On Beauty was nothing like what I thought it would be. The novel chronicles a middle-aged African American mother and wife, Kiki, as she comes to terms with her disintegrating marriage to an Englishman who is a professor of Art History. They have three children, Jerome, Zora, and Levi, whose lives also take up a significant portion of the novel.
     Smith takes an outside approach to exploring race relations in this mixed family. The household is split-- Howard and Zora are a part of an intellectual community while Kiki and Jerome are non-conformists and somewhat clinging to their "Blackness". Jerome, the oldest, is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. These characters didn't seem authentic to me at all-- they all seemed to be playing a role. None of them came across to me as real.
     To her credit, Smith is excellent at helping the readers see the minute details in life-- this is one of the few qualities I appreciate about this novel. This isn't to say that I'm disappointed, although, I am a little underwhelmed. I was hoping to glean a fresh look at the mixed-race experience, but I feel that a lot of Smith's material is recycled. I'm not stating that this is a bad thing, but I just wish she had gone a little further-- dug a little deeper. Overall, the novel introduces you to the lives of the characters on a surface level, avoiding or barely acknowledging all the shades in-between.
I will give Smith credit for some controversial arguments she makes. She discusses affirmative action a great deal and the educational divides between upper and lower class blacks. Still, Smith doesn't force you to think too hard about anything you don't want to; I walked away from this book feeling like something was missing, and as badly as I wanted to love this book about beauty, I just couldn't.