It's a family affair

At first, I struggled to warm to Zadie Smith's 2005 novel On Beauty - billed as a return to form after 2002's The Autograph Man - and suspected I'd have been better off taking her celebrated debut, 2000's White Teeth, as the more obvious starting point.

Perhaps it was because it had been a while since I'd read such a densely plotted doorstop novel. Perhaps it was because I'm unfamiliar with the book to which On Beauty is (in Smith's words) a "homage", E. M. Forster's Howard's End.

But gradually I was drawn into this dramatised clash of culture, class, politics and personality just as inexorably as the fictional Belsey and Kipps clans find themselves drawn together by circumstance. The relations between the different members of the two families are varied, mediated by everything from lustful attraction to professional enmity. The intricate web that Smith weaves gets progressively more tangled, perhaps too overly reliant on coincidence and contrivance (the friendship between the matriarchs, Kiki Belsey and Carlene Kipps, in particular is a stretch) but only to ensure that there's a great deal that can unravel as the book reaches its satisfying climax.

On Beauty is in some respects a comic campus novel in the tradition of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge, with the pretentious liberal Howard Belsey and the pompous conservative Monty Kipps locking horns in a satirical swipe at the self-importance of academia. But all of the characters are subjected to the mockery of their creator to a greater or lesser degree, whether gently or sharply. I particularly enjoyed the passages featuring Jack French, a smartly observed caricature of the sort of scholar pressed into service as head of department against his will, who talks in circles but says nothing while presiding over interminable staff meetings and seems to have a pathological fear of conflict.

There is a seriousness to On Beauty, too. Most affecting is the scene in which Howard tries to reconcile with his estranged father, only to be painfully let down once again by the old man's incorrigible racism. In a novel that repeatedly highlights the distances that spring up or inevitably exist between parents and children (most notably, between Howard and his youngest son, the streetwise non-academic Levi), it's a bitter but poignant reminder of the difficulties of cross-generational communication and understanding, and the challenges of intra-family (rather than inter-family) discord.