Caught on Campus

A clunky description, but then houses, real and metaphorical, are where families live. Howard is white, Kiki black, their three children are somewhere in the middle, and their marriage has lasted thirty years. The house they live in, 83 Langham, is Kiki8217;s house. Kiki8217;s great-great-grandmother had been a house-slave, her great-grandmother a maid, and her grandmother a nurse who got the house as an inheritance. And of course it changed the lives of the Simmonds family: 8220;An inheritance on this scale changes everything for a poor family in America: it makes them middle class.8221;

Howard8217;s lover 8212; the affair is long over when this novel opens, but the consequences are there all through 8212; is not only white, but she is also a poet on the faculty of the New England liberal arts campus where the novel is set.

Meanwhile, a culture war is looming on the campus. Trinidadian right-wing pundit Montague Kipps, who has just published a successful book on Rembrandt, arrives in Wellington proposing to take the 8220;liberal8221; out of the liberal arts. While Monty Kipps and Howard Belsey are engaged in an academic feud, their non-intellectual wives, Carlene and Kiki, develop an unlikely friendship. Carlene 8212; home-maker, formal, 8220;womanly8221; 8212; declares that while men speak of what to live for, it8217;s whom you live for that matters to her as a woman. Kiki, who works as a hospital administrator, in a white-collar but non-academic job, has different views: 8220;I know I didn8217;t live for anybody 8212; and it just seems to me it8217;s like taking us all, all women, certainly all black women, three hundred years backwards.8221; Yet these women discover that there is indeed shelter in friendship, in conversation, in a middle ground that their husbands, lost in the extremes of their politics, will never know.

Smith paints an insightful picture of the other side of academia: its little agendas, phrases and posturing. Many of the absurdly, sadly comic things, she gets right: for example, Howard8217;s old dream of travelling. 8220;Always flying,8221; says the Haitian driver, and Howard thinks to himself: 8220;Travel had seemed the key to the kingdom, back then. One dreamed of a life that would enable travel.8221;

But the novel is more interesting as the story of a family, and this is where, occasionally, the plot succumbs to the temptations of coincidence, and the characterisation to caricature. As a family, the Belseys 8212; and what they stand for 8212; are painted with warm, textured, likeable untidiness while the Kippses get almost no chance and remain difficult to like 8212; even Carlene with her vaguely bizarre utterances. What the families stand for often becomes more important than what they are. Even among the Belseys, Howard deconstructs everything until there is nothing left; Jerome has religion, and Zora has academic zeal. Kiki, warm and practical, whisks her family along, feels a pang while issuing instructions to her Haitian cleaner, and makes that 8220;imaginary speech to the imaginary guild of black American mothers: And there8217;s no big secret, not at all, you just need to have faith, I guess, and you need to counter the dismal self-image that black men receive as their birthright from America 8212; that8217;s essential 8212; and, I don8217;t know8230; get involved in after-school activities, have books around the house, and sure, have a little money, and a house with outdoor.8221; But at this point, and even before New Orleans and Katrina, Kiki has to abandon this self-indulgent reverie.

Finally it is Levi, moving from the megastore out into the street, who finds shelter in a phrase 8212; 8220;situationists transform the urban landscape8221; 8212; and the possibility it suggests. But this suggestion comes too late in the novel, when five kinds of headgear, repeated cries of 8220;Yo!8221; and an assumed Roxbury identity, have already made a caricature of Levi.

Despite the slightly uneven texture that lost it the Booker in what has been one of the closest contests in years, On Beauty is a warm and intelligent novel. Its successes, as may be expected in an hommage to E.M. Forster, come in the short, sharp and glorious bursts when feeling meets insight. The miracle of Smith8217;s prose like this more than makes up for the lesser moments.