Book Club Guide

On Beauty

by Zadie Smith · 2005 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The academic liberal as a specific type of hypocrite
Forster's Howards End transplanted — what happens to the argument in America
Two families, one painting, many competing claims to beauty

About this book

Two academic families — one liberal white British, one conservative Black American — are connected by a long professional rivalry, their children's entanglements and a painting that both men want to own. Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is a deliberate retelling of E.M. Forster's Howards End set in a New England college town.

Published in 2005, On Beauty won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Smith has said she reread Howards End while writing it and that the Forster parallel shaped many of her structural choices.

Discussion questions

The novel is explicitly a retelling of E.M. Forster's Howards End. How does Smith use this intertextual frame — and what does moving Forster's argument to a New England university town in 2005 reveal?
Howard Belsey's liberalism is a performance that protects him from genuine self-knowledge. How does Smith develop this — and is he sympathetic?
Kiki, Howard's wife, is the moral centre of a novel that often focuses on the men. How does Smith develop her — and what does Kiki understand that the academics cannot see?
Beauty — of the academic kind, of the physical kind, of the painted kind — is the novel's central term. What does Smith say beauty is — and what does possessing it, claiming it or loving it cost people?
On Beauty won the Orange Prize. How does it compare to White Teeth — and what does the Forster frame do for Smith that inventing entirely from scratch did not?