On Beauty

Zadie Smith is an interesting writer. Her books don't have a lot of plot, and they tend to be a bit all over the place. But the longer you sit with them, the more depths you find. These books are dense, and they take a lot of digesting.

I liked On Beauty more than White Teeth. This book is tighter, more focused. Both the beginning and ending make sense to me in the context of the entire story. I know why Smith started where she did, with Jerome's emails. And I liked the ending. It was a bit abrupt, very loose and ambiguous. But it makes sense for this story.

This book follows a family living in a small liberal college town in Massachusetts as they interact with a much more conservative family, the patriarch of which is their patriarch's greatest rival. Smith pokes into politics, race, class. And while she didn't really change my mind about anything, I thought she did a decent job of presenting both sides of the arguments, skewering the ones that became too extreme on either end, and arguing for us to make more of an effort to meet in the middle.

This wasn't the most accessible of books, and it took me a while to really get into it. But there are some truly lovely passages. Smith has an amazing way with words, an incredible ability to make the intimate feel epic. She makes this little story feel universal, both by making it very specific and very common.

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