On Beauty

I didn't enjoy it as much as White Teeth-but still a cut above most of the other ‘modern literary fiction' out there!

Perhaps I will write more about this later after my bookclub discusses the novel, but I really enjoyed this! Smart, funny, insightful, mostly believable. The book is about so much: family, academia, marriage, culture wars, politics, religion, art, gender, class. I'm impressed with Zadie Smith, and eager to read more by her. I enjoyed listening to this, and then reading sometimes too.

I read these reviews and I swear we read different books. This was such a struggle to get through that I actually stopped and read the summary so I could end my suffering sooner.

This book was ok. I didn't like that the cheating husbands got away with it in the end.

I wasn't in love with this book. It was, at least, engaged, through most of the book although the last 75 pages or so were a slog. I've read enough campus/professor/infidelity books to last me a life time - didn't really need another. I also thought that most of the book depended on cliches and caricatures and really didn't add anything to the genre.

‰ЫПAnd so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and bring to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people. Neither as hard as she had thought it might be nor as easy as it appeared.‰Ыќ

It's hard to compare to my totally sublime experience reading Smith's first novel, “White Teeth,” for a fabulous class taught by a fabulous professor that elicited fabulous discussion. I hesitate to say that “On Beauty” is gloomier than “White Teeth.” Instead, I think “White Teeth” beautifully straddled the line between tragedy & comedy (often being both at once), and I either (quite possibly) need a class on “On Beauty” to appreciate it fully, or it was more plodding than Smith's first effort.