"The future is another country," Carl said, kind of sad. Then the punchline hit him and his face broke into a smile. "And I still don't have a passport."
Two academic families. They should get along - same world, same profession. They don't. At all.
The Kipps are in England. Black family, Jamaican roots. Monty Kipps is a big-deal Rembrandt scholar. His wife is gorgeous and smart. The kids are beautiful and confident. Money in the bank. Conservative Christians. Monty rails against abortion, gay rights, multiculturalism, affirmative action - the whole liberal agenda.
The Belseys are in America. Howard Belsey is white, English, academic. He married Kiki, a Black American woman who speaks her mind and owns her curves. Their three mixed-race kids are still figuring out who they are. Howard's career? Stuck. His latest book? Going nowhere. And Monty Kipps - his professional rival - represents everything Howard despises. So when his oldest son Jerome decides to intern with Kipps in England? Howard loses it.
That's just the beginning. Things get worse from there.
"You never even notice. You never do. You think it's normal. Everywhere we go, I'm the only one in this white ocean. I barely know any Black people anymore, Howie. My entire life is white. The only Black people I see are the ones cleaning under my feet in your university's cafeteria."
The Belsey marriage is imploding. Howard cheated. He claims he was chasing beauty. Kiki sees it as proof of everything that divides them - especially race. The cracks have been there all along.
Race and Beauty
Those are Smith's twin obsessions here. Race cuts through every relationship. And the search for beauty drives people to do stupid things. Sometimes these themes connect, sometimes they don't. But they expose the contradictions we all carry.
Howard champions his working-class roots while looking down on his butcher father. He hates England but brags about it to American friends. How can this white English guy understand his Black American kids? How can his privileged kids relate to ghetto youth or Haitian immigrants fleeing dictatorship? How can academics understand people without degrees?
Difference is the heart of this story. Ethnic, social, cultural, political difference. Smith sets most of it in America - maybe because the differences cut deeper there, hurt more.
"The Lacrimosa, you know it? It's like, the eighth beat," Carl said impatiently. "I sampled it for a track I made after the concert, and it's wild - the angels singing higher and higher, and the violins, I swear, unh da-DA, unh da-DA, unh da-DA - it's incredible to hear, and when you put words over it with a fat groove underneath..."
But there's a way through. Art. Beauty. It's the universal language that bridges all those differences.
A Mozart concert. Rembrandt paintings. Rap. Poetry. The form doesn't matter - only the rush matters. Though that rush can be dangerous. Howard keeps falling for beauty despite himself, until he learns that beauty, like everything else, needs to be tamed.
He should annoy us - this aging, pathetic academic. But he's touching. His battles are already lost. He makes mistakes, tells lies. Yet he moves us as much as he amuses us. He's a man facing a world that won't stop moving: old age approaching, wife changing, kids growing up and pulling away, academia that doesn't want him anymore, technology mocking him.
Howard is the 20th century man waking up in the 21st. The intellectual full of certainties watching his foundations crumble. The wounded man hiding behind irony.
I really liked Howard.
This novel is cruel but tender. Funny and mean. It tosses political correctness in the trash and refuses to take sides.
Translated from English by Philippe Aronson
Gallimard, 2016. Folio, 2009. 608 pages.
Read as part of English Month organized by Lou, Titine and Cryssilda.
