On Beauty by Zadie Smith
But it was hard to resist the poetry of the possibility, and so she had allowed 'Halleluiah' to fall into family myth. Thinking back, this has been a mistake. A tiny one, to be sure, but symptomatic of profound flaws. Why did she always concede what was left of the past to Howard's edited versions of it? For example, she should probably say something when, at dinner parties, Howard claimed to despise all prose fiction. She should stop him when he argued that American cinema was just so much idealized trash. But, she should say, but! Christmas 1976 he gave me Gatsby, a first edition. We saw Taxi Driver in a filthy dive in Times Square - he loved it. She did not say those things. She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Halleluiah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. And then the kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene's empy chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang 'All You Need Is Love' and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis.
p. 174
Sometimes I find passages in books, and i just want to point at them. look, look, how beautiful. It's taking me a long time to read through this book, but that's okay. Sometimes the best books are the ones that need to be chipped away at slowly.
p. 174
Sometimes I find passages in books, and i just want to point at them. look, look, how beautiful. It's taking me a long time to read through this book, but that's okay. Sometimes the best books are the ones that need to be chipped away at slowly.