‘Howards End,’ her beginning

OH happy day when a writer as gifted as Zadie Smith fulfills her early promise with a novel as accomplished, substantive and penetrating as “On Beauty.” It’s a thing of beauty indeed.

Smith pierced the fug of publishing in 2000, at age 24, with “White Teeth,” a vivacious chronicle of two ethnically diverse families whose interwoven stories convey mounting tensions in contemporary multicultural London. Literary oddsmakers wondered whether she was a one-hit marvel after her less successful second novel, “The Autograph Man,” which explored the nature of celebrity. This third novel -- rightly short-listed for Britain’s Man Booker Prize -- should put that question to rest.

A homage to E.M. Forster’s “Howards End,” “On Beauty” is less hip and more conventional than Smith’s first two books but no less ambitious. In tackling grown-up issues of marriage, adultery, race, class, liberalism and aesthetics, she thrillingly balances engaging ideas with equally engaging characters.

Smith uses Forster’s 1910 exploration of idealism not just as a jumping-off point for her novel but also as a template. It’s a clever way to avoid the daunting blank page. By closely modeling her narrative arc on Forster’s Edwardian classic without being rigidly bound to it, Smith continues the literary conversation about values that Forster boldly initiated 95 years ago. The two novels ask how we should engage with both the art and the prose of life. Should those privileged with superior education and income feel compelled to share their advantages with the less fortunate?

This is not to say that “On Beauty” is a contemporary retelling of “Howards End.” It is a fully achieved work in its own right, although close textual comparisons of the two novels will provide fodder for English majors for years to come. Both pit liberals against conservatives and slyly skewer the hypocrisies at either extreme. Sadly, even well-intended social activism has tragic results in both novels, leading us to wonder whether Forster’s famous maxim, “Only connect,” might be better rephrased as “Only connect -- don’t meddle.”

Set largely at tony fictional Wellington College in Massachusetts -- yes, it’s an academic novel -- “On Beauty” centers on a feud between two radically different Rembrandt scholars that spills over to affect their families.

Smith, who was born in North London to an English father and a Jamaican mother, makes the transatlantic crossing with apparent ease. Her remarkable ear captures theory-choked academese, Brooklyn gangsta-speak, teen slang and a Southerner’s rhapsodies on the technological magic of “Pah-point.”

As we’ve come to expect from Smith, her two feuding families are of mixed ethnicity. The Trinidad-born Sir Monty Kipps, one of the first blacks to attend Oxford University, seems to have it all: knighthood, unswerving faith in his God and himself, a deferential Caribbean-born wife, a successful book on Rembrandt, a gorgeous 18-year-old daughter, an upright banker son and a major collection of Haitian folk art. Monty’s troubles begin when he accepts a visiting lectureship at Wellington, where 56-year-old Howard Belsey has been plugging away at his own opus on Rembrandt for 10 years, still without tenure.

Howard, the son of a British butcher, fled the narrowness of his father’s white working-class London for the United States, where he married Kiki Simmonds, an imposing African American hospital administrator from Florida: “A goddess of the everyday.” They have three teenagers, who come alive in all their adolescent orneriness. Ironically, the one who worries them most is neither the youngest, whose quest for ethnic identity involves him with a shady gang of disaffected Haitians, nor the middle child, a fiercely driven Wellington sophomore who makes a talented, disadvantaged street rap artist her special project and sets out to expose hypocrisy everywhere. It is their gentle eldest, who alarms them when he embraces religion.

The author sets up an ideological dispute between Monty and Howard that is both cultural and political. To the pompous, suave Monty, being black is “not an identity but an accidental matter of pigment.” He also believes that equality is “a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream ... that Art was a gift from God ... and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.” He opposes affirmative action: “What message do we give to our children when we tell them that they are not fit for the same meritocracy as their white counterparts?” Opportunity, he adds, “is a right -- but it is not a gift. Rights are earned.”

In sharp contrast, Howard is didactically liberal, an atheist who supports abortion and homosexuality and heads the college’s affirmative action committee, believing it is important to redress the balance of a legacy of stolen rights. Even at the risk of stifling free speech, he rails against Monty’s freedom to spread his homophobic, conservative messages.

Howard is exasperatingly theoretical, especially to his earthy wife. We gradually learn that Kiki has become more critical of her husband after catching him cheating on the eve of their 30th wedding anniversary. Howard finds himself trapped in the “purgatory forgiveness involves” as Kiki reevaluates their formerly close marriage, her husband’s corrosive irony and her own life choices. With characteristic wit, the author pinpoints their differences: “She called a rose a rose. He called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/ artifice.” She adeptly sums up Kiki’s bitter disillusionment: “The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

Smith captures all these viewpoints and voices with an assured blend of sympathy and amused skepticism. Typical of the agility with which she conveys ideas and characters is her arch description of Howard’s grandiose opening lecture in his 17th century art course. For the sixth year in a row, she tells us, Howard asks his students to “imagine prettiness as the mask that power wears. To recast Aesthetics as a rarefied language of exclusion.... ‘Art is the Western myth ... with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.” Smith’s punch line -- “Everybody wrote that down” -- gently mocks the students.

The joke is that Howard is writing a book on Rembrandt yet hates all representational art. He professes to abhor Mozart too, but he can’t listen to the composer’s music without falling apart. He is also a helpless sucker for female beauty. (Stupidly, he tries to defend his infidelity to his 250-pound wife by pleading aesthetic attraction.) Monty, for all his righteousness, is no better.

As good as she is with big ideas, Smith is even stronger at capturing family dynamics, the heartbreak of broken trust as well as the lovely connections between siblings. In a book filled with memorable passages, there is a wonderful scene in which the three Belsey kids meet by accident in Boston and clearly find “such a shelter in each other.” The most devastating confrontation occurs not during the novel’s somewhat contrived climax but when Howard slips away from a funeral in London to visit his elderly father and comes smack against the knee-jerk bigotry that sent him into a rage years earlier.

Smith’s discussions on the role of art, beauty and ethics are larded with poetry by her husband, Nick Laird, and rap lyrics by her brother Doc Brown. There also are lush descriptions of paintings by Rembrandt and Jean Hyppolite, numerous literary references (some as small as the Alice Walker Barnes & Noble tote bag that Kiki carries) and paeans to Hampstead Heath, London cemeteries and practiced marital sex.

Evident throughout is Smith’s droll humor, as when Howard orders a cab after his dismaying reunion with his father: “When it arrived, the driver’s door opened and a young Turk in the literal sense leaned out and asked Howard a rather metaphysical question. ‘Is it you?’ ” A throwaway line in another writer’s hands, perhaps, but in Smith’s, it shrewdly cuts to the core of her characters’ -- and our -- central dilemma: Who are we? Like Forster, Smith goes a long way toward answering that difficult question. *