The back cover of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty asks, why do we fall in love with the people we do? My question would be, why do we fall in love with the Belsey’s, a family so dysfunctional it could only be love that keeps them together and holds the reader right there, in their kitchen. The family’s ongoing feud with the Kippses provides fodder for a tremendously good satire. I’ve had On Beauty beside me on my desk for well over a year as I’ve completed the second and third drafts of my first effort manuscript, a humorous cozy crime novel. When I need inspiration, which is often, I grab Smith’s shining example, open it to a random page, and read. If you’re smitten by stellar character driven fiction this is one you’ll want to read.
At the outset, the Belsey family is arguing over what is surely a breakfast scene that has played out countless times in their lives together. But this particular morning they are reading emails from an absent son. One wonders why Howard, a seemingly loving father would have such disregard for his son’s needs. Indeed one wonders this throughout. But somehow my own fondness for the pompous middle aged man in black jeans grew and by the end I found myself rooting for him, looking beyond one bad decision after another, and indeed hoping for the entire lot of them to continue to find ways to hold their quirky family together.
Kiki, fiercely determined to keep her children from going off the rails finds herself wondering how she could be so in love with Howard. On the occasion of their wedding anniversary she thinks:
“…with her eyes closed, and with his hair escaping her fingers, they could have been standing in any happy day of any of these thirty years. Kiki was not a fool and recognized the feeling for what it was: a dumb wish to go backwards.”
Howard, too, is trying. Because he loves Kiki. Later in the story:
“Howard stood and went over to the drinks cabinet by the stereo. He opened the little door and turned to see Kiki standing. He looked at her pleadingly. She sighed and sat down. Howard brought over a bottle of amaretto and two brandy glasses. It was a drink Kiki loved, and she inclined her head in grudging admission of a good choice.”
And yet there he is again. One too many drinks. One more devastating decision and the little ground he has gained is lost.
Told from a rotating point of view we hear from each of the family members who, as people do, focus mainly on their own places in the messy drama that is daily life in the Belsey household. Zora, like her happily self-centered twenty-something brothers, lives in her own world. But those worlds also connect and when the siblings find themselves in a chance encounter, ostensibly delivered on the wind, they marvel at the sight of one another.
“It was freezing; the wind enough to upend a small child. They should all have gone inside somewhere and had coffee, but to leave the spot would have been to abandon the miracle of it, and they weren’t quite ready to do that.“
The poignancy of the moment for Kiki, sitting in her far away office and looped in by phone by three children eager to share the chance encounter was less enthusiastic.
“Kiki grinned into the mouthpiece, but real enthusiasm failed her. There was a residual melancholy connected to the thought of these three newly coined adults walking freely about the world without her assistance, open to its magic and beauty, available for unusual experiences and not, explicitly not, typing doctor’s notes into the Beecham Urology Ward’s patient records.“
As a mother I can appreciate Kiki’s fierce loyalty to her family and yet I also feel the pain of her position as family matriarch. While appearing to be a thankless job, it’s so much more. With each shattering of her heart, her love expands. For family.
This book will appeal to readers and writers alike. It’s a book that requires commitment from the reader, not only to the beautiful prose, but to the characters who will draw you into their lives and keep you there long after you’re done reading the book. And for writers, particularly emerging writers like myself, you won’t go wrong keeping this one un-shelved.
