New & Current Releases
Archives: A-Z By Title
Archives: A-Z By Author
Advanced Search

All-Time High Scores
Best Of 2006
Best Of 2005
Best Of 2004
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Books In Our Forums

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed books.

On Beauty
A Novel
by Zadie Smith


7.3

based on 32 reviews
read critic reviews
how did we calculate this?

based on 17 votes
read user comments
rate this book

Compare prices at pricegrabber.com

Buy it at powells.com

Buy it at amazon.com

Buy it at amazon.co.uk

Official Publisher Site

Smith's third novel is a 21st century take on E.M. Forster's "Howards End."

Penguin Press, 464 pages
09/13/2005
$25.95

ISBN: 1594200637

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Daily Telegraph Alex Clark

On Beauty--like Howards End--is a humane novel whose character-driven emotionalism packs far more of a punch than its articulation of rarefied arguments.

Library Journal Barbara Hoffert

With fully realized characters and a kaleidoscope of provocative issues, Smith has created a world you can truly enter. [1 Aug 2005, p. 73]

London Review Of Books Frank Kermode

A complicated story making up by richness of implication what it lacks in exuberance.

Los Angeles Times Heller McAlpin

Oh happy day when a writer as gifted as Zadie Smith fulfills her early promise with a novel as accomplished, substantive and penetrating as "On Beauty." It's a thing of beauty indeed. [25 Sep 2005]

Publishers Weekly

The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. [1 Aug 2005, p. 44]

Salon Laura Miller

This one is a keeper. It's the kind of book that reminds you of why you read novels to begin with

San Francisco Chronicle John Freeman

Rich and entertaining and, despite the ugly truths [Smith] uncovers, often quite beautiful.

The Guardian Stephanie Merritt

On Beauty confirms Smith as an outstanding novelist with a powerful understanding both of what the brain knows and of what love knows, especially when it comes to families.

The New York Times Michiko Kakutani

Like Forster, Ms. Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice - at once authoritative and nonchalant, and capacious enough to accommodate high moral seriousness, laid-back humor and virtually everything in between - and in these pages, she uses that voice to enormous effect, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane.

TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Sophie Ratcliffe

On Beauty is an attempt to pay tribute to the way others look, to Mozart's music and to Rembrandt's paintings. Zadie Smith asks for attention for others. She deserves more than a second look herself.

Washington Post Michael Dirda

To this satirical, wise and sexy book, the correct critical response should largely be either gratitude and admiration or a simple "Wow."

Chicago Tribune Julia Keller

"On Beauty" is just a novel. But it's one of the best of the year, a splendid treat, and Forster, were the somewhat dour scribe alive today and inclined to read it, surely would give Smith a long, slow, deeply knowing and most un-Forsterian wink.

The Onion A.V. Club Andy Battaglia

In the end, On Beauty stands as a rich survey of people living through complex fates that their tidy ideas fail to account for.

PopMatters Ratha Tep

Smith doesn't meet the stylistic bar she's set for herself, but makes up for it in substance--in spades.

USA Today Deirdre Donahue

Smith succeeds in making On Beauty a celebration of Forster. But she is such a talented writer that in choosing to pay tribute to Forster, she has shortchanged her own gifts.

Village Voice Joy Press

On Beauty is even more entertaining and bumpy than her previous novels, crammed with characters who speak in wildly different registers and get tangled up in sex, class, and racial snares.

The New York Times Book Review Frank Rich

What finally makes "On Beauty" affecting as well as comic is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to "only connect" her passions with the prose of the world as she finds it.

The New Yorker Joan Acocella

While the plot is a wreck, many of the episodes it engenders are not. They do what the realistic novel is supposed to do--hold up a mirror to its time.

The Economist

While the plot doesn't quite build to the climax one might hope for, a lovely boisterousness and joy in spoken language carry it through.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Zsuzsi Gartner

This is, ultimately, a deft homage, as well as a book wholly the author's own. But I can't help wondering, what would E. M. Forster think? And does it matter? [17 Sep 2005]

The Guardian James Lasdun

Sheer novelistic intelligence--expansive, witty and magnanimous ... irradiates the whole enterprise.

The Independent Maya Jaggi

With her lucid perspective and implacable sense of satire, Smith has succeeded in stretching the English comic novel's net of empathy. But, as she no doubt realises, there is yet more of life to let in.

The Independent Scarlett Thomas

With On Beauty, Smith demonstrates that she can write a book that is just as readable and addictive as White Teeth (you will finish it at 3am, regardless of when you start reading it).

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

This is a 443-page novel you wish were longer--much longer--so that Smith could deepen her rich, marvelous story. [16 Sep 2005, p. 90]

Kirkus Reviews

In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone. [1 Aug 2005, p. 812]

Atlantic Monthly Joseph O'Neill

Although the full, tragic dimensions of the human adventure may be missing--an odd, sitcommy inconsequentiality colors the disasters that befall her characters--there's no doubting the artistic conviction that underlies this unabashedly conventional novel.

Boston Globe Gail Caldwell

"On Beauty" is too long-winded. Its actions, external and interior, don't always warrant its pages and pages of speech or description, which can start to feel superfluous and tangential after a while. Still, this is a rollicking and heartfelt story with endurance at its center

Daily Telegraph John Preston

Although there is plenty to relish in On Beauty, the story is not sufficiently well-controlled to enable Zadie Smith to show off her considerable gifts to their best advantage.

Sydney Morning Herald James Bradley

Even more than White Teeth, On Beauty is a strikingly uneven work, not just in tone but in the sorts of questions it seems to want to ask. Far too long and surprisingly undisciplined despite its bravura plotting, in many places it skates perilously close to being boring, a fate the energy of Smith's prose and her remarkable descriptive facility only narrowly hold at bay.

New York Observer Shazia Ahmad

[White Teeth] was sassy in the best sense of the word... On Beauty is by comparison disappointingly sedate. It seems that the pretensions of Harvard have zapped the spirit out of the author’s voice.

The New Republic Robert Alter

On Beauty is an odd mixture--alternately amusing, perceptive, even emotionally absorbing, with some of the narrative zest of White Teeth, and then too often schematic, insistent, or simply not quite credible.

The Nation William Deresiewicz

Given how long and rambling and thematically incoherent the novel is in its final form, one can only imagine what the manuscript must have looked like.

The average user rating for this book is 7.3 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Marie A gave it a9:
I loved being in Zadie Smith's Wellington world for most of this novel. Slow start, but once the characters' somewhat separate stories connected together this was a quite enjoyable, if not a modern E.M. Forrester-like read.

Tommy A gave it a1:
What a piece of convoluted faux-intellectual garbage. Word, yo, as her stupid characters would say.

Rosie R gave it a5:
Competent and quite engrossing, but ultimately disappointing. This is a book to read for its plot; there is little of interest here in form or style.

Helen S gave it a6:
A page turning read especially for an avid Forster fan but disappointing in the final analysis. Characterisation is amusing but the overall thematic significance of Howards End is unattainable. It steals from Forster and gives back a ragged, distorted shadow of his great work. Smith does not deserve to call herself a fan of the greatest novelist of all time.

William D gave it an8:
A mixed bag. I thought the satire wasn't sharp enough and the male characters more one dimensional than "White Teeth" Still, this is carping...her talent and intellect are fairly stunning

Michael K gave it a10:
I love all of her books including the brilliant and underrated Autograph Man. White Teeth is a comic novel about working class Londoners; On Beauty is a satire of cultural politics set in an academic community not unlike Cambridge, MA. White Teeth is about the cultural interaction of Bengali, Arabic, black, and white Londoners; On Beauty explores issues of social class as represented by the Kipps and Belsey familiies, but also by Carl Thomas and Choo, both of Roxbury. First-time novelist Stephen L. Carter received a 2-book deal worth $2.2 million for his Emperor of Ocean Park, a thriller-like novel set in an essentially conservative segment of the upper-class black academic world. On Beauty goes much deeper than that and satirizes both sides. In White Teeth, when Joyce Chalfen tells Clara Bowden that it's the "responsibility of intellectuals" to educate children like Irie Jones, it echoes the outdated historical idea of the "White Man's Burden," however, that's not what's happening in On Beauty. And finally, I think it's funny that E.M. Forster's Wilcoxes show up here as owners of a chain of preppy clothing stores!

Dan B. gave it a9:
Everytime I read a book by her I want to marry her.

On Beauty A Novel by Zadie Smith

On Beauty
A Novel
by Zadie Smith