![]() ![]() ![]() Howard Belsey, a white Englishman teaching at a Massachusetts university, represents the end of the line of an austere theoretical project: The big book he's been puttering on for years is meant to demolish the sacred reputation of Rembrandt and to indict "prettiness as the mask that power wears." Monty Kipps, a black Englishman of Caribbean descent, is the kind of right-wing iconoclast beloved of Op-Ed page editors, a mix of V.S. "On Beauty" is the story of two families, headed up by academic men who are each other's opposites and enemies. It's the kind of book that reminds you of why you read novels to begin with. Nevertheless, to the mere reader, plunging into "On Beauty" feels a lot like being Dorothy in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz," stepping from the black-and-white Kansas of 2005's ephemeral literary offerings and into the Technicolor of Oz. Forster, a writer she's described as her first literary love. "On Beauty" belongs to the well-established genre of academic comic novels, and it's openly a riff on "Howards End" by E.M. The chronically self-deprecating Smith would, of course, make no grand claims for her book. It may well be that "On Beauty" feels like a revelation because it arrives toward the end of a year of uniformly drab, if occasionally accomplished novels. Academic cultural critics - who get a few taps on the snout in Zadie Smith's new novel - often say that works of art can only be fully understood in their historical context. ![]()
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