![]() ![]() From the very beginning of her career comparisons to Dickens have abounded, and for good reason Zadie Smith can write our contemporary world unlike any other author today. Zadie Smith treats us to another somewhat raucous family drama with On Beauty, not unlike White Teeth in certain ways, her critically acclaimed debut novel for which she won the Whitbread Award in 2000. And among many, many other things, On Beauty is their story. They are the children of Howard, a perennially un-tenured art history professor at a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, and Kiki, a "goddess of the everyday,” as one character puts it, and the heart of the Belsey family. Meet the Belsey children: Jerome, Zora, and Levi. ![]() They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.” After a few years, Levi arrived space was made for him it was as if he had always been…He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. ![]() Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel-before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets. “People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. (Reviewed by Nora Kathleen Reilly JUN 4, 2006) ![]()
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