http://www.douban.net/review/latest/ Latest reviews from Neenee on douban.net © 2005, douban.net. Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:48:21 GMT http://www.douban.net/review/2000149/ Neenee reviews: Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister
rating: OK

I still don't get what this book was on about. But while the author might have had problems sufficiently separating his book from the fairy tale to lucidly create his own world and his own message, "Confessions" is really well-written and is meaty enough to provide for a great literary discussion. The book delves into the cultural obession with, and construction of, beauty and femininity as well as the varying sources and forms of female strength. ]]> Neenee Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:48:21 GMT http://www.douban.net/review/2000149/ http://www.douban.net/review/2000147/ Neenee reviews: On Beauty
rating: Great

I just finished reading On Beauty by Zadie Smith. Although it is far more serious than White Teeth, On Beauty was definitely a good book, satisfying in a way that Smith's sophomore effort, the Autograph Man--or what I got through of it--was not. Of course, the humor of Smith's debut effort was missed; White Teeth's wonderful hilarity is part of why it is so un-put-down-able. Although in interviews, my beloved Zadie is about as humorous as a set of drawers (but a very beautiful and well-dressed set of drawers, with FANTASTIC cheekbones), when it comes to her writing, she is a mad comic genius. Example: The two awesomely crabby Jamaican elders who share residence in Archie and Samad's favorite pub who spout out such hysterically caustic remarks at their fellow bar denizens, you more than laugh out loud, your belly hurts badly from the gut-level laughter you are forced to produce. At the same, White Teeth is also filled with absolutely gorgeous passages so transcendent and lovely they stick with you forever, like when Smith's garrulous narrator loses its eloquence in describing the desires of Mr. de Winter (nee Wocjiecki) and his immigrant comrades at the end of the 20th century ("space space just space space"). And the author's tremendous gift for dialogue gives rise to conversations that are both believable and dramatically effective, such as the Existential (and Nietzchean) conversation that accompanies Archie's dramatic confrontation with Dr. Sick. Well, really it's a soliloquy since Dr. Sick does almost all the talking. But what a soliloquy! It's a primer on 20th century philosophy, as well as an awesome expose of character, of both what is redeemable and unredeemable about the former Nazi doctor, and maybe humanity in general.

But enough about White Teeth (although, can you tell, I love it. It didn't change my life, but it made it so much better). On Beauty is set on the Massachusetts campus of a small liberal arts college called Wellington. (The college-setting makes you wonder how much of the novel and its themes are a product of the fellowship year Smith spent at Harvard, America's permier academic institution.) The book is a satire of the world of academia, specifically the liberal-arts academia, but comes at the satire through its main characters, the members of the mixed-race Belsey clan: Howard, the England-born art-history professor father, Kiki the nurse and once-politically-outspoken mother, Jerome, the sensitive and religious and good oldest son, Zora the single-minded daughter who is also a student at Wellington (her single-mindedness reminded me so much of White Teeth's technocrat-in-the-making Magid), and Levi, the wannabe-gangsta youngest child, still in high school. In the incestuous world of a small liberal arts college, the Belseys' family dramas have magnification beyond the family hearth.

The drama of the novel is mostly a product of Howard's mishaps--his rivalry with another professor, a conservative black academic named Monty Kipps, as well as his affair with a woman that takes place prior to the start of the novel. Although the family is coming together at the beginning of the novel, (massive spoiler alert!!!) the identity of Howard's partner in adultery rams the family apart, as does another indiscretion. Howard, it often seems, cannot do anything right. He is incredibly self-centered, so much so that he cannot come off his planet to realize the harms he perpetrates on his loved ones. He can't understand why his affair hurts his wife so much, and lets his competition with his rival professor consume his career to self-defeating ends. His classes on art history are not at all about art appreciation--instead, he deconstructs Rembrandt's genius to rob the Master of any of his well-deserved glory. Howard doesn't want his students to see Rembrandt as a genius, but to understand that "genius" is a social construct, it wasn't about Rembrandt's limited talents at all. But really, it just seems like Howard wants to cut down anyone and everything. In the end you sympathize, though--his arrogance and self-attachment are too familiar. So many characters in the novel share this flaw, a common one in the Ivory Tower, in the world of "smart people" in general.

If you read a Dickens novel, especially one of his poorer ones like the Old Curiousity Shop where you don't care a fig about the major characters, you realize that so much of his power as an author comes from his ability to create minor characters who suddenly walk into the novel-- maybe just one scene-- and bring so much with them that they illuminate the novel in ways the major characters cannot. Just like in real life--how sometimes it is people who you barely know whose lives change yours forever. Smith has this gift too. I loved the characters of Choo, the elegant and proud former school teacher from Haiti, who the charming Levi is unable to charm without having his eyes blown open to the great suffering of the Haitian people under the dictatorship; the child prodigy Katie Anderson, from somewhere in small-town America, who cannot get herself to pipe up and contribute in Howard's class, despite all her intense preparations, because of Howard's inscrutable questions, which require her to use a dictionary to understand.

The novel is about beauty, about people's obsession with it, about how it goes away with time, about how the so-called "beautiful people" often are hurt by their beauty. About how universities serve the purpose of beauty, and are beautiful in themselves, and just like other beautiful things "can be destroyed." Another theme is time, but I still don't know what Smith was trying to say with this exactly. Both Howard and Kiki are former beauties, although time has marred them; one of the reasons why Kiki can stay with Howard is because she has spent so much time with him and can envision him at all the different ages of his life; Howard though cannot understand why it is valuable to just spend time and watch the telly with the provincial father he despises, seeming to believe it is about the quality of the moments rather than their quantity. I will have to read the novel more to understand these motifs.

What I got out of it, though, is once again Smith's obsession with morality. I remember reading about Smith and her fondness for moral themes, and I can detect it from reading both this novel and White Teeth. There is this feeling as you read that Smith, like a good parent, is constantly trying to teach you how to act, what is right and wrong, what is good and beautiful and what is not, through the travails of her characters. Like The Great Gatsby, this novel leads you to the fact that some judgment must be made, and some things must be valued above others. For all his intellect, Howard will never have the contentment of his conservative rival, because at least Kipps has the passion of his ideals (however misguided and self-hating as they are). You can sit at your desk up in the Ivory Tower and think up the most beautiful ideas, but if they are divorced from any moral code, even one that is self-concocted, they are not beautiful at all. In On Beauty, nothing is as beautiful as morality.]]> Neenee Sun, 31 Dec 2006 08:24:26 GMT http://www.douban.net/review/2000147/