On Beauty
A Novel
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4.1 • 174 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth
"Thoroughly original . . . A novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
This wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This rich, funny novel is a deeply human portrait of a family at war with itself. English art historian Howard Belsey and his American wife, Kiki, are raising their three bright, opinionated children in a cozy New England college town when their lives become entangled with the family of Howard’s deeply conservative academic rival. What begins as an intellectual clash gets way more personal as marriages strain, secrets surface, and questions of race, class, and community come to the fore. Zadie Smith’s writing crackles with wit, energy, and insights into everything from campus politics to family dynamics. The result is a vibrant, gloriously messy social comedy about what happens when sociopolitical ideals collide with everyday life. Smart, generous, and bursting with life, On Beauty is a joy to read.
Customer Reviews
Eye of the Beholder
This book takes place in Boston and Smith penetrates its location as she does London in her other novels. One focus is academia and the feud between two of the protagonists is perceptive and funny. Smith captures the all too often pretentious and toxic world of woke academia in a way that resonants precisely in 2023.
Characters Beautifully created
A study of people who think they know their direction. Excellently written.
Beautifully written ... but what else?
I was really expecting more from the plot with this novel. The character development was there, yet each character was unlikeable and the “climax” of the book was at the end and was barely climactic at that. I was lead on by the positive reviews but the story was a bore to me.