Since my dear friend, Cindylu, just published a post titled “On Beauty”, I figure I might as well dig through my unpublished drafts and publish one with nearly the same title. I wrote this about a year and a half ago over a steaming glass of chai in Delhi, India. I’m looking forward to reading whatever it is that Zadie Smith comes out with next.

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Just like White Teeth years ago, I read every single page of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty with both joy and jealousy. Joy because it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, superbly bouncing the writer’s ball of observation and insight against the borders of love and fidelity; race and class; intellectualism and empathy; beauty and power; conservativsim and liberalism; theory and practice. Jealousy because it is precisely the sort of novel I would have liked to one day write myself … and, because it’s so glaringly obvious that – right now – I couldn’t. Not like Smith; the believability of her characters and their interactions, her idiosyncratic descriptions, the way she masters dialect without limiting anyone to the way he or she speaks. Most importantly, though, is the frictionless and pleasurable impact of her prose despite – or because of – its crisp, clear, and cliché-free simplicity.

With two bunched fists Kiki thumped the sides of her legs in frustration. ‘It’s all the same thing, I’ve been thinking about all of this – it’s part of the same … just veil of doom that’s descended on this house – we can’t talk about anything seriously, everything’s ironic, nothing’s serious – everyone’s scared to speak in case you think it’s clichéd or dull – you’re like the thought police. And you don’t care about anything, you don’t care about us – you know, I was sitting there listening to Kipps – OK, so he’s a nutcase half the time, but he’s standing up there talking about something he believes in.

Though less than 500 pages, the novel is encyclopedic in its scope. It’s not fair to pick only one theme as representative of the novel – what I’m focusing on is much more representative of me. The above quote comes from an argument between Howard – the university intellectual – and his wife Kiki – a hospital administrator, whole and good and self-described as simple. Howard is a liberal relativist; an art history professor; a skeptic of all absolutes. Kiki has been a loving wife for thirty years until discovering her husband’s affair with a fellow professor and family friend.

At least a sliver of the novel deals with the egocentric, self-absorbed nature of intellectualism. The gladiator-like ideological battles. The deductive dismissal of morality to excuse obvious moral transgressions. Western, liberal intellectuals have long valued irony and articulate wit over sincerity and good behavior. Cervantes and Oscar Wilde and Voltaire become heroes not because of their contribution to a better, more fair society, but because they have sharp tongues and mischievous one-liners.

They’ve long been my heroes as well. When logic chides against the foundation of absolute morality, young ambition searches for something other than righteousness. And in our society, it is much more fashionable to be young, clever, witty and worldly than to be simply good. Here is Zora, the over-achieving daughter of Howard and Kiki, talking with her friends about the affair between her father and her poetry professor.

‘Are you serious? She totally can’t look me in the eye – even in class, when I’m reading she’s nodding at the window.’
‘I think she’s just ADD,’ drawled Daisy.
‘Attention Dick Deficiency,’ said Zora, because she was extremely quick. ‘If it doesn’t have a dick, it’s basically deficient.’
Her little audience guffawed, pretending to a worldliness none of them had earned.
Ron gripped her chummily round the shoulders. ‘The wages of sin, etcetera,’ he said as they began to walk, and then, ‘Whither morality?’
‘Wither poetry?’ said Hannah.
‘Whither my ass?’ said Daisy, and nudged Zora for one of her cigarettes. They were smooth and bright, and their timing was wonderful, and they were young and hilarious. It was really something to see, they thought, and this was why they spoke loudly and gestured, inviting onlookers to admire.
‘Tell me about it,’ said Zora, and flicked open the carton.
And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.