Howard Belsey, a Rembrandt scholar who doesn't like Rembrandt, is an Englishman abroad and a long-suffering Professor at Wellington 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, and 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.
Then Jerome, Howard's oldest son, falls for Victoria, the stunning daughter of the right-wing icon Monty Kipps. Increasingly, 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. . .
This is such a tricky one for me! I really admire Zadie Smith's prose, and her ability to construct believable characters is second to none. I loved the focus on academic pretension - Howard and Claire were simply insufferable with all their obfuscating phrases so symptomatic of the insular academic world. But I couldn't help but feel that the point of this book was to show how clever it was. It felt very smug! Maybe that was the point, though. It also felt a bit scattered, almost a series of vignettes that never fully came together. I felt this way about Smith's NW too - the end just sort of fizzled despite the promise of her obvious talent. White Teeth remains, by far, my favourite of her novels, and now I'm left wondering if my love for that book is a sad one-off. I'll probably press on with her work, though, because White Teeth gives me such hope.
