On Beauty Book Review

On Beauty by Zadie Smith

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


(1.5 stars)

I'll start with the good stuff: this book has a really nice cover; great minimalist design with a lovely font.

Now the bad stuff: the novel itself.

This is a story that deals with themes of race, identity, love, and finding the things that make each of us happy. The themes are interesting and far reaching in that they are easy to relate to; the problem I had is that the story and writing itself has so many faults, it ends up coming off as a bad sitcom. The writing itself almost makes it seem like a screenplay; there's a ton of dialogue, tons of melodrama, and the structure of the prose is formulaic. Virtually every single scene follows the structure of (1) describing the setting, (2) setting up the mood of the characters in the scene, and (3) presenting a back and forth dialogue. It's just so predictable that I ceased to derive even the most rudimentary enjoyment from the prose. Another problem with the writing is that a lot of the characters are supposed to be using African American English and street slang but the author can't seem to get enough away from her British English to create a believable dialogue between the characters, so things end up sounding a bit off. Perhaps the biggest issue I had with the story though is that the characters come off more as caricatures than real characters. I never really felt like the characters had true identities of their own, Smith just seemed to bend their identities around what was needed to get her points across. In the end the characters were nothing more than vaguely defined shells filled with nothing more than what the author directly presented (i.e., they were two-dimensional and didn't find a life of their own beyond the story).

I will say though that I did become more interested in the story as it neared the end (thus the extra half star), but I suppose it's a bit like watching some crappy drama on TV in that you've invested so much time in the characters that you can't help but be interested in seeing how things will turn out - regardless of how lousy the story is. I do think some people will enjoy this novel (there were several people, including the teacher, in my English class who enjoyed it), but I'm sure there are just as many who will despise it every bit as much as I did.



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