ON BEAUTY
by Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 432 pages

”Imagine being her, thought Zora vaguely.” “Zora” is Zora Belsey, a sophomore at Wellington, the liberal arts college outside Boston where her father Howard teaches a rebarbatively theoretical kind of art history. And imagining, or failing to imagine, what it is like to be someone else is a central preoccupation of the novel in which they appear.

On Beauty, Zadie Smith’s Booker shortlisted third book, borrows its structure unapologetically from E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Forster’s novel turns on the inter-familial antagonism between the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, and begins with Helen Schlegel’s declaration of love for the unsuitable Paul Wilcox. On Beauty pits the Belseys against the Kippses, and starts with the Belseys’ eldest child, Jerome, e-mailing from London to inform his father that he intends to marry Victoria Kipps, whom he has known for less than a week.

Victoria’s father Monty is a black conservative intellectual, recently knighted, who, like Howard, writes on Rembrandt. Howard, who is English and white but is married to a black woman, regards Monty’s work as hopelessly retrograde and naive. When it emerges that Kipps has been invited to Wellington to give a series of lectures, he tries to get the invitation withdrawn. Later, Zora is drawn into the fray at a faculty meeting when Monty protests the continued presence in a poetry class of Carl (the novel’s Leonard Bast), a black rapper and “spoken word” artist she met at a local club. Carl, meanwhile, has made the acquaintance of Zora’s younger brother Levi, who affects the argot and attire of the “street”. Smith’s handling of these different voices and registers is one of the most impressive things about the book:

Monty’s perorations on the responsibilities of the “coloured man”, for instance, are no less convincing than Levi’s ostentatious refusal to decline the verb “to be” correctly.

In a long acknowledgments section of a kind more often found in an academic monograph, Smith describes On Beauty as a homage to Forster, to whom, she says, all her fiction is “indebted”. However, that indebtedness - not immediately apparent in her previous novels, White Teeth and The Autograph Man, which fizzed and dazzled under the more obvious influence of Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and young American writers such as David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers - is not merely a matter of architecture or plot. It has also shaped Smith’s notions about what the novel, as a form, can do.

She has written elsewhere that she learned from Forster that there is “no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right”. His novels show us that our “moral enthusiasms make us inflexible, one-dimensional, flat”. Indeed, according to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, a character is flat when no “private lusts or aches” complicate the “consistency” of the “idea” that he or she embodies. Characters thicken into “roundness”, in his view, when they are touched by the “incalculability of life”.

The so-called truth of fiction lies in the way it reveals what, in ordinary life, remains hidden; its “solace” in the glimpse it allows us of a “more comprehensible and thus a more manageable human race”. Smith’s earlier books may have suggested that her commitment to this novelistic doctrine was merely formal (in White Teeth, for instance, the Forsterian injunction “only connect” is recast as a post-colonial, multicultural platitude); but On Beauty follows Forster’s example by allowing its characters to fail at knowing themselves - and others.

The novel is full of “ideas”, but most of the time these are emblems of the characters’ unknowing, rather than just being vehicles for the kind of riffing that pockmarked Smith’s previous work: the suave certainties masquerading as radical scepticisms that Zora learns from her father come at the price of her failure to get anywhere with Carl, while the intensifying moral passions of Howard himself are the measure of the hardening of his heart and the accompaniment to the break-up of his marriage. Reflecting on his father’s household ban on representational art, Jerome wonders “how can you love someone who says no to the world... so consistently?” (a question amusingly reprised by Victoria Kipps, when she shares an undergraduate in-joke with Howard, whose course she is auditing while her father visits Wellington: “Your class is all about never ever saying I like the tomato”).

In one of the few negative reviews Howards End received, Forster was accused of sacrificing “artistic truth” to the “exigencies of his philosophical moral”. The same can’t be said of On Beauty, which enacts its “philosophical moral” by sacrificing authorial style to the style of its characters the better to show us, as Smith puts it in her essay on Forster, “how very difficult an educated heart is to achieve”.