"On Beauty" by Zadie Smith

One may as well begin by acknowledging that although the plot is based on Howard's End by E M Forster, Zadie Smith has written a novel that not only translates the action to American academic life but spectacularly transcends her original.

The bare bones of the story are there. It starts with the line: “One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father” (Kipps and Belsey: 1) Jerome Belsey, going to stay with the Kipps family (whose right-wing patriarch is at academic war with Jerome's dad, Howard) falls in love with Victoria Kipps, daughter of the family. Howard pays a visit and spectacularly causes embarrassment. But his wife Kiki Belsey forms a friendship with Mrs Kipps, an ethereal woman very much in the mould of the original. This friendship prompts Mrs K to scribble a hand-written unwitnessed codicil to her will, leaving the family's most valuable painting to Kiki, a donation the Kippses hush up and burn.

Leonard Bast appears to, in the figure of cool and gorgeous hip hip artist Carl, with whom Zora Belsey, Howard's daughter falls in love and whom her poetry class at college patronise (in both senses). 

I guess the sixteen year old Levi Belsey is supposed to mirror Tibby in Howards End but Tibby is academic and so vague as to be translucent while Levi fizzes with life and hooks up with some Haitians in an attempt at revolutionary socialism with all the misguided zeal of his youth. 

Victoria's equivalent disappears to Africa for most of the Forster book but Victoria makes a huge impression on the text by sleeping not just with Jerome but also with his father and with Carl. So the plot element of the man whose secret affair becomes known is still there but with the 'wrong' family.

But why worry about the correspondences? The characters in this book are wonderfully and anarchically real, taking the plot by the scruff of its neck and forcing it into the shape they want.

Of all the characters it is Howard who experiences the most 'only connection' when he has a series of epiphanies in the middle of the book.

• At Mrs K's funeral “a man in front of Howard checking his watch as if the end of the world (for so it was for Carlene Kipps) was a mere inconvenience in his busy day, even though this fellow too would live to see the end of his world, as would Howard, as do tens of thousands of people every day, few of whom, in their lifetimes, are ever able to truly believe in the oblivion to which they are dispatched.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 2) which is too much for Howard and he has to run out of the church.
• Then he finds himself in a London street with all the variety of people there. “We scum, we happy scum! From people like these he had come. To people like these he would always belong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 3)
• He then finds himself in a pub watching football on the television. “Soon he was cheering and complaining with the rest.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

But it is Levi who articulates it, in a scene interpolated into the three scenes of Howard's: “Sometimes it's like you just meet someone and you just know that you're totally connected, and that this person is, like, your brother - or your sister.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 4)

And the beauty? There is a poem entitled 'On Beauty' and there are many discussions of aesthetics. There are questions such as whether hip-hop is 'proper' poetry (the poets try to make Carl write a sonnet). Zora is transfixed by Carl's physical beauty. Howard gives lectures debunking Rembrandt and is told by Victoria (who becomes one of his students) that there comes a point when he should stop discussing tomatoes and just say 'I like tomatoes'. 

But the analysis deadens a book which, otherwise, is brimming with life, driven by some unforgettable characters. 

And it can be very funny:

• “She lived through footnotes. ... so intent was she upon reading the guidebook to Sacre-Coeur that she walked directly into an altar, cutting her forehead open.” (Kipps and Belsey: 7)
• “Whenever Howard saw an opportunity to take the moral high ground he pretty much catapulted himself towards it.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “When confronted with people she knew to be religious she began to blaspheme wildly.” (Kipps and Belsey: 12)
• “Jack’s two PhDs, in Lydia's mind, made up for all the times he tipped coffee into his own filing cabinet.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 2)
• “Zora's silent sulks were always oppressive, and as belligerent as if she was screaming at you from the top of her lungs.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Somehow if you ordered the cheesecake as an afterthought it had fewer calories in it.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “These shoes took stairs in only one direction.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 11)

Selected quotes:

• “It's very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind (b) shouting (c) analysing the ‘phoney metaphysics’ of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing.” (Kipps and Belsey: 1)
• “When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgment.” (Kipps and Belsey: 2)
• “The windows retain their mottled green glass, spreading a dreamy pasture on the floorboards whenever strong light passes through them.” (Kipps and Belsey: 3)
• “He thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.” (Kipps and Belsey: 5)
• “Levi treasured the urban the same way previous generations worshiped the pastoral.” (Kipps and Belsey: 8) And why not?
• “Faced with the smallest slight to himself or his character, and, in particular, his clothes, Levi would argue for justice for as long as he had breath in his body, even when - especially when - he was in the wrong.” (Kipps and Belsey: 9)
• “Summer left Wellington abruptly and slammed the door on the way out. The shudder sent the leaves to the ground all at once.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “Bottom line? I'm not a big talker. I don't express shit well when I talk. I write better than I speak. ... Talkin’? I hit my own finger. Every time.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 1)
• “She too had spent much time in universities. She understood the power of the inappropriate.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 3)
• “‘I don't ask myself what did I live for,’ said Carlene strongly. ‘ that is a man's question. I ask whom did I live for.’” (The Anatomy Lesson: 4)
• “Levi was still only sixteen, living with his parents in the middle class suburb of Wellington, and therefore not really a viable stand-in father for her three small children.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “Situationists transform the urban landscape.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 5)
• “This concern with beauty as a physical actuality in the world ... that’s clearly imprisoning and it infantilizes ... but it's true.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “Try walking down the street with fifteen Haitians if you want to see people get uncomfortable.” (The Anatomy Lesson: 6)
• “And now the practical hats of the Kippses were put on. The women in the room were not offered hats and instinctively sat back in their chairs.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 1)
• “Opportunity ... is a right - but it is not a gift. Rights are earned.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 8)
• “She was the kind of person who never gave you enough time to miss her.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 9)
• “Inside Levi's room the smell of boy, of socks and sperm, was strong.” (On Beauty and Being Wrong: 12)

September 2025; 443 pages

First published by Hamish Hamilton in 2005

My Penguin paperback edition issued in 2006

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Autobiography of Red" by Anne Carson

 This is described as a modern epic poem although I could see little that was distinctively poetic about it apart from the fact that it is written in alternately long and short lines and that punctuation is no guide as to when these lines will end. Some of these lines use words in an interesting and original way but it is mostly narrative. 

It is a bildungsroman, chronicling the childhood and young adulthood of Geryon. He is described as a monster, as red, and as having wings. I presume that these features are a way of symbolising the fact that he is different. Nevertheless, he goes to school, albeit reluctantly. He is bullied by his elder brother who also, it is implied, sexually abuses him. As a young gay man he begins an affair with Herakles, a very confident, manly man who treats him as a sex object. Later, he goes  to Latin America and studies; he also takes photographs. By chance he re-encounters Herakles who now has a Indian American boyfriend called Ancash (which means Blue in a South American Indian language although the reader is never told this). Herakles wants Geryon and Ancash. The relationship ends in tears.

It is a charming and sensitive portrait of a young gay man.

Selected quotes:

• “It was a typical tango song and she had the throat full of needles you need to sing it.” (31)
• “The hour of six pm flowed through the hotel like a wave. Lamps snapped on and white bedspreads sprang forward.” (32)
• “Herakles’ gaze on him was like a gold tongue. Magma rising.” (33)
• “Herakles liked to make love early in the morning like a sleepy bear taking the lid off a jar of honey.” (34)

September 2025; 147 pages

First published in Canada by Alfred A Knopf in 1998

My Penguin Vintage Classics paperback edition was issued in 2024

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"A View of the Harbour" by Elizabeth Taylor

 A novel dissecting the relationships between the members of a community, a stiff-upper-lip English version of Trindadian Miguel Street by V S Naipaul, Welsh Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas or Californian Cannery Row by John Steinbeck. It is framed by the characters observing one another, often through windows, which are framed. But their observations are inevitably flawed, like Bertram, the retired naval officer and would-be painter, whose paintings never measure up to the vision he had in the first place. 

The heart of the plot is a secret love affair. Beth Cazabon, an author, lives with her husband Robert, the local doctor, and her two children, Prudence, a strange and troubled teenager, a five-year-old Stevie. Next-door-neighbour Tory (Victoria) Foyle, a divorcee, is her best friend ... but she is also conducting a secret affair with Robert. Mrs Bracey, who owns the local shop, is paralysed and spends all day in bed looking out of the window, and bullying her daughter Millie who runs the shop and cares for her; the other daughter Ivy works at the pub. Bertram Hemingway, newly retired from the Royal navy and living on half-pay, flirts with Lily, widowed owner of the waxworks, and Tory; he also sits with Mrs Bracey. 

Prudence discovers the affair between her father and Tory.

In terms of plot, the tension is provided by this affair and the question as to whether Beth will learn of it. But presiding over the village from her bed is paralysed Mrs Bracey a monumentally self-centred woman. She's more than just selfish, though she is very selfish. She doesn't exactly take the place of God, although she acts as judge, dealing retribution without mercy: “Mrs Bracey sat in judgment. Guilt she saw, treachery and deceit and self-indulgence. She did not see, as God might be expected to, their sensations of shame and horror.” (Ch 13) She isn't just solipsistic, although she believes that when she dies the world will end: “When I die it dies also, and then it might never have been.” (Ch 16) She actually thinks that God, like Maisie, is her servant: “Mrs Bracey ... had always been aware of the concentration of God upon her, an omnipotent God, vaguely, and yet, over small matters, still at her beck and call. When she wished Him to give her His attention she opened a little shutter in her soul ... He would receive her orders and listen to her explanations (taking them at face value), but at the same time could be excluded from any shameful thoughts ... When she shut God away she did not imagine Him turning his thoughts to any others of His flock. It was rather like giving a maid the afternoon off, except that she imagined Him mooning about, idle, restless, waiting.” (Ch 15) What a woman!

I think my favourite bit-part was the librarian who personally reads and censors the books in his care: “Murder he allowed; but not fornication. Childbirth (especially if the character died of it, but not pregnancy. Love might be supposed to be consummated as long as no one had any pleasure out of it.” (Ch 2)

My favourite funny moment is in chapter 14 when Lily thinks that a brothel is a soup-kitchen, presumably because it contains broth. 

The whole thing is wonderfully character-driven. I enjoyed the fact that it avoids the class bias that so many books of that time display. 

The prose is third person omniscient and in the past tense. It is quite 'proper' and one imagines Ms Taylor spoke BBC English. It is carefully constructed with little fat.

Selected quotes:

• “Two days in this place and the tide creeps up, begins to wash against me, and I perceive dimly that there is no peace in life ... not until it is done with me for ever.” (Ch 1)
• “The young imagine insults, magnify them, with great effort overcome them, or retaliate. A waste of emotion Bertram thought, forgetting how much emotion there is to spare.” (Ch 2)
• “Smells of stew crept round the kitchen.” (Ch 2)
• “I dreamt I was at her funeral and when we were in the church I suddenly noticed that the coffin lid was moving up and down very slightly.” (Ch 4)
• “Writers are ruined people. As a person, you're done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper.” (Ch 5)
• “Mrs Bracey lent back with her face turned to the clock, but her eyes shut, for a watched clock never moves, she had long ago decided.” (Ch 5)
• “Odd means someone who is left over when the rest are divided into pairs.” (Ch 6)
• “Little boys have a peculiar smell, too, as if they have been clutching pennies in their hot hands all day.” (Ch 8)
• “As soon as he stepped outside, tiredness and depression dropped over him like a damp cloak.” (Ch 9)
• “She was weary of all the mothers of her acquaintance claiming sensitive and highly-strung children, no matter how phlegmatic, even bovine, they might be.” (Ch 10)
• “Everything was round the wrong way. In the days when she had been a little girl, the horrors were in the story books ... and the outside world was cosy: now, the horrors were real, and, to compensate, the child's imagination must be soothed and cosseted with innocent bread-and-milk.” (Ch 12) Written in 1947 and perhaps even more relevant today with all the trigger warnings.
• “The sunlight filled the room as if it were wine in a glass, flashed on the knives and forks, showed up the smeary windows.” (Ch 14)
• “There is no need to look smug and knowing - like the Mona Lisa - or - or a lavatory-attendant.” (Ch 16) What a brilliant juxtaposition! And how knowing lavatory attendants must be!

Elizabeth Taylor also wrote Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. 

September 2025; 304 pages

First published in 1947 by Peter Davies Ltd

My paperback edition was issued by Virago in 2006

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Still Lives" by Reshma Ruia

Madame Bovary in Manchester. Emma Bovary becomes PK Malik, an Indian businessman in Manchester, whose business is struggling. Seeking an escape from his disappointing family life, seduced by glamour, he begins an affair with the wife of his most successful rival. Inevitably he finds himself living far beyond his means. All of his dreams are disappointed. 

This story of ordinary people is firmly rooted in reality, underscored by the matter-of-fact chapter titles, eg "A Football Match", "Tough Times", "A Pair of Red Shoes". This everyday style reminded me of the 'kitchen sink' novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe and The Lowlife by Alexander Baron. So many novels nowadays seem to harness escapism that it is refreshing to discover that authors can still find drama in the ordinary.

It is narrated in the present tense (although there are a couple of moments when it seems that PK is looking back on the story) by PK the protagonist. Many of the chapters end with letters written by Geeta, PK's wife.

The ring of truth about this novel is substantiated by the relentlessness of the trap that is tightening around the hero. The reader hopes that this remorseless author will find a happy ending but fears that PK's story can only end in tragedy.

The Set up of the Plot

 Prakash Kant 'PK' Malik left India and settled in Manchester where he became successful in the rag trade. A wannabe fashion designer, he was one of the pioneers of cheap fashion: taking haute couture, changing it slightly, and marketing it to the masses. But when the novel opens, his business in struggling. The competition is personified by Cedric Solomon. At the same time, his wife Geeta is growing fat and their only son Amar, born after a number of miscarriages, has special needs and is entering adolescence. Spending mushrooms in the absence of love, putting intolerable pressure on PK's finances. He seeks escape and begins an affair with Cedric's wife, Esther. I particularly enjoyed the irony when the clothes designer first seeks happiness by getting naked with his lover.

Selected quotes:

• “Anybody can be happy - there is no skill in that. what is important is to become a someone.” (Ch 17)
• “All love stories are accidents ... A crazy lurch in the dark, and if we're lucky someone steps out to catch us, to break our fall.” (Ch 18)

September 2025; 309 pages

Published by Renard Press in 2022

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God