Well, at least to buy this book for 50p my mom had to go all
the way to the Red House in Bexleyheath (disclaimer: she was going there to see
the place, not to buy cheap second-hand books).
Much like with Franzen when he writes about things outside
of Minnesota, I honestly think Zadie Smith loses her spark when she goes beyond
(Northwest) London. On Beauty is
undeniably well written (you don’t say…), but it’s simply not as witty as White Teeth or even NW (whose recent BBC adaptation I had to stop watching after 20
minutes as I found it excessively intense and humourless). Maybe it just doesn’t
work as campus novel, or maybe I’ve had too much of the pettiness of some
academics in real life, but to me so much of the book just reads like the
script from an episode of Black-ish,
a sit-com that I really don’t find particularly funny.
What probably disappointed me the most was the big faculty
meeting towards the end of the book – I was expecting something as epic as the
FutureMouse conference from White Teeth,
but instead I actually got a bitchy, well, faculty meeting…
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