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On beauty a novel

Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three...

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Main Author: Smith, Zadie (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Penguin Press, c2005.
Subjects:
College teachers > Fiction.
Racially mixed children > Fiction.
Massachusetts > Fiction.
Domestic fiction.
Coming-of-age fiction.
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Summary:Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering professor at Wellington, a liberal New England arts college. He has been married for thirty years to Kiki, an American woman who no longer resembles the sexy activist she once was. Their three children passionately pursue their own paths: Levi quests after authentic blackness, Zora believes that intellectuals can redeem everybody, and Jerome struggles to be a believer in a family of strict atheists. Faced with the oppressive enthusiasms of his children, Howard feels that the first two acts of his life are over and he has no clear plans for the finale. Or the encore. Then Jerome, Howard's older son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps, and the two families find themselves thrown together in a beautiful corner of America, enacting a cultural and personal war against the background of real wars that they barely register. An infidelity, a death, and a legacy set in motion a chain of events that sees all parties forced to examine the unarticulated assumptions which underpin their lives. How do you choose the work on which to spend your life? Why do you love the people you love? Do you really believe what you claim to? And what is the beautiful thing, and how far will you go to get it?
Physical Description:445 pages ; 25 cm.
ISBN:9780143037743
0143037749
9781594200632
1594200637
Author Notes:Zadie Smith is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. As of 2012, she has published four novels, White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002), On Beauty (2005), and NW (2012), all of which have received critical praise. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors and Smith won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2006. Her novel White Teeth was included in Time magazines TIME 100 Best English-language. Smith joined NYU's Creative Writing Program as a tenured professor in 2010.

Smith attended Hampstead Comprehensive School, and King's College, Cambridge University where she studied English literature.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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