Enlivened
by exasperation
Zadie Smith's responses to
Forster's novel intrigued readers both online and at the
Book Club event, says
John Mullan
Saturday July 22 2006
http://books.guardian.co.uk/bookclub/story/0,,1826231,00.htmlvisited
in November, 2008
Some novelists have the ability to
create characters real enough to arouse
antipathy. One of the readers at the Guardian Book Club
told Zadie Smith that
she was intrigued by Zora, the academically ambitious
student daughter of Kiki
and Howard Belsey. Yet in the same breath she said that
she was irritated by
her. "Yes, she is quite irritating," agreed the novelist.
"Quite
like me when I was that age." She wanted her to irritate
us and attract
our sympathy. Readers agreed that characters often come
alive when they
exasperate us in On Beauty. The prime exemplar was Howard
Belsey, failed
academic and absurd adulterer, but Smith also gently
pointed out how ridiculous
were some of his wife Kiki's prized notions. She too has
her pretensions and
her "self-help clichés".
There was much discussion of how a
novel set in America, featuring a black
American woman married to a white English man, deals with
race. Did taking EM
Forster as her model presuppose anything about her likely
readership? Even,
asked one reader, its "caucasian base"?
Smith replied by saying it made her
"sad" when readers of White
Teeth had told her how much they liked whichever character
was ethnically most
like them. As a novelist she wanted readers not just to
"identify with the
character you look like". Black writers and readers should
"identify
wherever they want". Being an English novelist, she said,
"all my
ideas are class-based". The passage where Howard returns
to visit his
father, and demonstrates a complete failure of generosity
or sympathy, was
found especially poignant by one of the readers. "When you
move class it's
always a loss," observed Smith. For some, education - that
self-evident
good - is accompanied by "a kind of sadness".
Many of the bloggers on the Book Club
website were more exercised, and
sometimes irked, by the novelist's fame than by the book
in question. The
biggest question seemed to be whether her fiction was
"unjustly
praised" (as one reader put it). There was, however, some
heated
disagreement about her imitation of Forster's Howards End.
Several bloggers
fulminated at the word "intertextuality" ("that
fashionable new
buzzword") and scorned the notion that any original work
of fiction would
need to live off one that had gone before. Another
responded that the
irritating word merely stands for "the acknowledgment that
books are how
we shape our lives and our environments, and that the act
of writing need not
shy away from this fact". In all the argument there was
surprisingly
little sense of how idiosyncratic (and unmodish) was the
choice of Forster as a
model. One blogger even referred to the imitation of the
novel as a
"surefire formula" for critical approbation. Howard
Belsey's own
disdain for Forster's fiction is the characteristic
response of an academic
with any sensitivity to critical fashion. One of Smith's
defenders called her
homage "an act of submission, a love letter to a great
writer from an
emerging one". Another responded as the novelist would
wish: "I've
never read a word of EM Forster but I might now, after On
Beauty."
At the Book Club event, enjoyment of
the relationship between On Beauty and
Forster's fiction was unhampered. Smith was even asked for
her favourite
Forster novel, and recommended A Room with a View, perhaps
for the unusual
reason that it is full of lessons in "how to behave". What
Forster
thought his "sunniest" novel provides "corrections" to our
behaviour that remind us of Jane Austen, without being as
severe as her:
"When I read Austen I feel chastised." A reader at the
Book Club
observed that empathy in the novel - the reader's empathy
for a character, or
one character's empathy for another - often operated at
the moments where
language fell away. The clearest example of this was the
ending. As one blogger
put it, "Howard is alone in the wilderness, switching his
vision between
the real beauty of Kiki and the formerly real but now
representative beauty of
Hendrickje. I, as the reader, remain as perplexed as
Howard's audience and can
only wonder if Howard's grasping to connect and that final
'... yellow,
intimation of what is to come' is the luminous quality of
the light as final
embodiment of truth or an intimation of his death in the
wilderness
alone?"
As one reader punningly put it, this
really is "Howard's end",
where the lessons from Forster are finally absorbed.
Perplexity is the point.
Smith said that, finally, she had wanted to let her
characters escape the
reader - and the novelist. Psychological realism gives
both so much power. But
"these people aren't your toys any more". To the question
about Kiki
and Howard with which the ending leaves the reader - "Are
these people
going to stay married?" - she had a decided answer: "It's
none of our
business."
John Mullan, professor of
English at University College London.
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