FictionZadie Smith has a real novelistic gift. Her works are never short stories or novellas or lyric poems in disguise, but long, complex, polyphonic narratives: novels as we know they ought to be. She can do parties - "it was the kind of party where every hour two people leave and 30 arrive". Most writers are well advised to avoid any group larger than three, but Zadie Smith can control a crowd like the riot police.
Her great forte is her Dickensian capacity to paint the big picture. And she has other skills which resemble Dickens's: her characterisation is always vibrant and she is a good caricaturist:
Zora Belsey's real talent was not for poetry but for persistence . . . she was the master of redial . . . When the city of Wellington served Zora with (in her opinion) an undeserved parking ticket, it was not Zora but the city - five months and 30 phone calls later - which backed down.
Her ear for colloquial speech is as finely tuned as that of any phonetician - she is the Roddy Doyle of Kilburn. Regional, racial, social, generational dialects are reproduced here with scientific, and amusing, accuracy. Some of her young characters, busily inventing themselves, have their own idiolects:
"Kippses?' called Levi. "Kippses who? . . . where they at?"
This faux Brooklyn accent belonged neither to Howard nor Kiki [ his parents] and had only arrived in Levi's mouth three years earlier . . . The Belseys were located 200 miles north of Brooklyn."
The novel, which tells a story of two rival families, the Belseys in America (in Wellington University, the sort of exclusive campus, almost Ivy League, almost in Boston, which writers have invented because they can't very well set their novels frankly in the English department at Harvard, or wherever they did their last residency) and the Kippses in London. The Belseys are a mixed couple, Howard white and English, Kiki Afro-American. They are lively liberals. The English-Caribbean Kippses are more turgid; Prof Kipps is a "black conservative . . . anti- affirmative action", like "Condoleezza and Col-in". He is also a power academic "with his finger in every pie". Belsey is an art historian and Kipps a collector. Allusions to paintings, mainly Rembrandt's, abound and lovely verbal pictures based on his works frame the book, emphasising its main leitmotif : beauty.
Insofar as it is possible to summarise the sprawling plot, it involves an academic battle between the Belsey and Kipps patriarchs, and the sexual philandering of both, which results in Howard's downfall (or maybe not - his end is ambivalent). Written "in homage" to EM Forster, this book takes as its model Howards End. If you are clever or lucky enough to remember the latter well, you will appreciate the parallels, and some of the plot elements which seem slightly unconvincing will make sense. If you don't remember it, you could read it again, as I did - this will be a delightful chore. In fact, although it works independently, On Beauty can only be fully appreciated when read in conjunction with its 1910 predecessor, of which it is effectively a new version. Some analogues are exact - the opening sentence, the two estranged families more alike than they realise, the short-lived love affair which opens the story, the death of the right-wing mother and her legacy of a valuable possession to the other liberal mother, the superiority of women . . . all this is common to the two works. On the other hand, Smith takes on considerably more than Forster: he deals with the macrocosm within the sphere of the domestic, whereas she moves out into the streets, the workplace, the university.
The analogies in plot lessen as the novel progresses. It is as if the older structure could not sustain the weight of all the themes and characters Smith has charged hers with. It is impossible for her to remain faithful to her model and to her own tendency to be expansive - to be more Dickensian than Forsterian.
Of course, she would probably respond that she is under no obligation to be anything other than herself. Quite true. But comparisons with her original are inevitable, and who would fare well in such a competition? Forster opens his book slowly, but he is a master of pace and tension: his plot thickens, speeds up and the denouement is explosive. Drastic things happen: a murder, an imprisonment, an illegitimate birth (sensational, then). In On Beauty, the pace is too even, the sensational elements too tame. Mrs Kipps's legacy to Kiki Belsey, a picture, however valuable, does not have the imaginative impact of Mrs Wilcox's to Margaret - a beautiful house. In Forster's novel the representative of the lower classes, Leonard Bast, after an accumulation of appalling disasters is finally killed with an antique sword. Carl, Bast's alter ego in Smith's novel, gives up rap poetry and becomes an archivist. A tragedy, maybe, but not quite of the same proportions.
There is also some incohesiveness. If the novel were a house it would include more than one staircase leading precisely nowhere. An important little chunk of the narrative, for instance, is told from the point of view of Katie Armstrong, an interesting young person but not one who even appears elsewhere in the book. Levi Belsey, a great idealistic teenager, threatens to call a strike when the manager of the music shop in which he works part-time decides to open on Christmas Day. This good sub-plot, however, although not quite forgotten, just fizzles out. Forster would turn, or at least shift languidly, in his grave, at such breaches of the rules of logical plotting for which he was a stickler.
Honestly post-modern, or, as her detractors say, in need of better editing? Sometimes, for instance when reading the Katie Armstrong episode, one wonders if Zadie Smith is protesting against the constraints her chosen - old-fashioned - narrative structure places on her? Or deliberately shooting herself in the foot?
So, yes, it is flawed, as they say. But it is nevertheless a most impressive work. Smith has remarkable gifts, some of which indicate that she is much more than merely talented. Her ear for language is unsurpassed. Add to that her keen eye, her humour, her uncanny grasp of the zeitgeist. Her compassion. And her wonderful style.
I am delighted that On Beauty is on the shortlist of the Booker. It deserves its place. Whether it wins or not, Smith's work will endure. She is only 30 and she is already almost a master of the novel. This is not faint praise.
On Beauty By Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, 443p. £16.99
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer and an assistant keeper at the National Library Fiction