On Beauty by Zadie Smith
I was seriously disappointed when I read On Beauty by Zadie Smith. I actually hated this book. However, once I start a book I feel that I have to finish it. As a result, it took longer for me to get through the book because I had to force myself to pick it up!
The biggest problem for me was the characters. I found them completely underdeveloped and shallow. I didn't like any of them. I kept trying to make myself pick one to like but I just couldn't; they were all so uninteresting! The characters and their relationships felt completely contrived and unrealistic as well. Levi, the son of an academic, living in a college town walked around with a BAD Brooklyn accent? HA, I don't think so. And even if I assume that Smith intended for the accent to be so ridiculous, the rest of the accents don't make up for it. The dialogue itself was unrealistic as well. Perhaps I should have been tipped off when I read the first few pages of the book: a series of emails from the son, Jerome, to his father, Howard. They were completely improbable, no 19 or 20 year old would write like that to their parents whether they were in America or England. And, as I found out from the reviews I read on Amazon, the author is from England. Why in the world would she attempt all these AMERICAN accents and set her book in America? Why would she not stick to what she knows? Has she even visited America? Never in my life have I met anyone remotely like the people in her book. The characters were ridiculous and seemed like caricatures rather than real people.
The Kippses were completely ludicrous foils for the Belsey family. Their evangelical Christianity was hardly a factor in the story and therefore didn't make the ending with Monty Kipps' infidelity rather ridiculous as well. The sexual relationships were just too much. It was like everywhere you turned, another professor with another student or a colleague. I hope I'm not being naïve to think that this sort of thing is farfetched. I know it happens, but the sheer amount of sexual encounters was ridiculous. Especially, Victoria Kipps!
I'm still unsure about what Smith was trying to say here. There seemed to be no real point, no real story, no real plot. These loathsome characters seemed to just fall in an out of one another's live and randomly have sex with each other or have a debate about a painting or some sort of political ideology. Everything that was going to happen was so obvious and tiresome. I saw what was going to happen 50 or 100 pages before it happened. The larger issues Smith brought into the novel rubbed me the wrong way too. It seemed like she just added in everything and anything that could be seen as "juicy," hot button issues: class, race, gender, aesthetic. Just pick ONE and stick to it. Rather than making a point about any one thing, she jumbled them all up in a book with preposterous characters and, in my view, accomplished nothing.
The biggest problem for me was the characters. I found them completely underdeveloped and shallow. I didn't like any of them. I kept trying to make myself pick one to like but I just couldn't; they were all so uninteresting! The characters and their relationships felt completely contrived and unrealistic as well. Levi, the son of an academic, living in a college town walked around with a BAD Brooklyn accent? HA, I don't think so. And even if I assume that Smith intended for the accent to be so ridiculous, the rest of the accents don't make up for it. The dialogue itself was unrealistic as well. Perhaps I should have been tipped off when I read the first few pages of the book: a series of emails from the son, Jerome, to his father, Howard. They were completely improbable, no 19 or 20 year old would write like that to their parents whether they were in America or England. And, as I found out from the reviews I read on Amazon, the author is from England. Why in the world would she attempt all these AMERICAN accents and set her book in America? Why would she not stick to what she knows? Has she even visited America? Never in my life have I met anyone remotely like the people in her book. The characters were ridiculous and seemed like caricatures rather than real people.
The Kippses were completely ludicrous foils for the Belsey family. Their evangelical Christianity was hardly a factor in the story and therefore didn't make the ending with Monty Kipps' infidelity rather ridiculous as well. The sexual relationships were just too much. It was like everywhere you turned, another professor with another student or a colleague. I hope I'm not being naïve to think that this sort of thing is farfetched. I know it happens, but the sheer amount of sexual encounters was ridiculous. Especially, Victoria Kipps!
I'm still unsure about what Smith was trying to say here. There seemed to be no real point, no real story, no real plot. These loathsome characters seemed to just fall in an out of one another's live and randomly have sex with each other or have a debate about a painting or some sort of political ideology. Everything that was going to happen was so obvious and tiresome. I saw what was going to happen 50 or 100 pages before it happened. The larger issues Smith brought into the novel rubbed me the wrong way too. It seemed like she just added in everything and anything that could be seen as "juicy," hot button issues: class, race, gender, aesthetic. Just pick ONE and stick to it. Rather than making a point about any one thing, she jumbled them all up in a book with preposterous characters and, in my view, accomplished nothing.