On Beauty

Howard Belsey, a white British art historian at the fictional Wellington College who has built a career arguing that Rembrandt's genius is a myth manufactured by market forces, and Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian public intellectual who arrives as Wellington's new star hire, are set up as ideological opposites, but Smith's real interest is in how thoroughly both men's stated principles fail to govern their actual conduct: Howard preaches egalitarian feminism while carrying on affairs, Monty preaches family values while running a household as rigid and secretly unhappy as Howard's is chaotic.

The novel is an explicit homage to E. M. Forster's Howards End, transplanting that novel's class collision onto contemporary racial and culture-war terrain, right down to specific plot beats, a prized piece of property, a marriage strained by infidelity, a working-class figure both families use and discard. Smith's most pointed update is making the families' rivalry as much about aesthetics and taste as about ideology; Howard's contempt for Monty's conservatism is inseparable from his contempt for Monty's taste in music, art, and manners, snobbery dressed as principle.

Kiki Belsey, Howard's African American wife, and Carlene Kipps, Monty's ailing wife, form an unlikely friendship across the families' feud that Smith treats as the novel's genuine emotional center, two women who recognize in each other a shared exhaustion with the men whose public reputations they've spent decades quietly subsidizing. Their bond, formed almost entirely offstage from the men's public sparring, argues that the real intellectual honesty in the novel belongs to the wives, not the professors paid to have opinions.

Levi, Howard and Kiki's youngest son, adopts an invented Black urban identity at odds with his comfortable academic upbringing and eventually gravitates toward Haitian immigrant activism, a subplot Smith uses to needle the novel's more theory-minded characters: Levi's politics are unpolished and occasionally embarrassing, but his actual solidarity with Haitian street vendors does more concrete good than either father's decades of published argument. Zora, his sister, fights fiercely for a poetry class and a place in the university's intellectual hierarchy, only to discover how little the actual content of great poems interests her compared to the status of being seen to possess them.