Additionally, Howard’s falling asleep at Mozart Requiem concert indicates how disinterested he is in socialism and art and this portrays him as an alienated individual.
Not having a personal phone by Howard clearly depicts the communication gap the liberal and atheist Belsey family carries with their children. The father never replies to the son’s emails neither the Belsey members talk to each other during breakfast. Later, the reader is informed that silence is something inevitable in Belsey family. The tone of the son when he addresses his father clearly echoes that the father is a stern egocentric individual. Opening the novel with personal letters engages the readers into a more personal connection with the characters. The novel starts depicting a dispute of ideologies between a son and his father.
Only two minor female characters, Claire Malcolm and Victoria, are shown as unethical that balances out the novel not falling into the above mentioned two categories. From a feminist view, I would say that the females, especially the prime characters, are shown more sophisticated. Perhaps,from a sexist point, the author highlights that the males focus on the bodily beauties and females focus on ethics and subjectivity.
Though, intellectual talks between the professors, morally corrupt mentalities and disrespect toward nuptial bonds color the title of the novel pretty ironic in my view. With the development of the story, we find the emphasis on male and female concepts of beauty, ideas of physical and mental attractions and what we consider beautiful in humane actions of importance: intellectualism versus certification, conjugal vows versus extra-marital affairs, love verses sex. I sensed that the book shows a constant interrogation of what we call beautiful in human psyche, culture and physique. The title highlights that the storyline would suggest some epistemological idea on beauty from objective and subjective point of views and it does through different characters. The novel is inspired by the author’s autobiographical essence as Smith wrote the story from her own experience as a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. From an epistemological view, the novel shows concepts of morality, racism, apartheid, human psychology, constant construction and destruction of relationships and professional jealousy. Smith plans herself for an impressive work of fiction that bargains a style flexible enough to place divergent principles in one single podium between the families, the Belseys and the Kipps in an American university town. The campus novel, On Beauty (2005)by Zadie Smith, is marked as a clever reflection of E.M.Forster’s Howards End (1910). Campus Novel Book Review: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005)
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