Given the American media’s obsession with covering our country’s “culture wars,” it’s refreshing to read “On Beauty,” by Zadie Smith – a novel that wonderfully satirizes today’s society. On the surface, it seems this novel shouldn’t work well as a reflection of contemporary American society. First of all, Smith is British, and so are two of the main characters, Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps. These characters also live in the world of academia, one that is often criticized for being out of touch. Belsey and Kipps are two art history professors who are having an academic fight about the famous artist Rembrandt van Rijn. Belsey is an ultra-liberal professor teaching students at Wellington College, a New England liberal arts institute, to dislike Rembrandt and just about everything else. Kipps is an ultra-conservative professor who has just published a best-selling book in praise of Rembrandt. Then Belsey’s son, Jerome, decides to take an internship with Kipps, and in the process falls in love with Kipps’ daughter Victoria.

Jerome’s and Victoria’s short love affair is over by page 26, leaving Jerome “sarcastic, secretive, sixteen all over again,” but the clash of the families is just beginning. Kipps, with his academic celebrity status, gets a job at Wellington. Meanwhile, Belsey is on rocky ground with his wife of 30 years, Kiki, after a stint of adultery. Kiki searches for new friendship, and finds it with Kipps’ wife, Carlene.

This plot may seem familiar to someone well versed in British literature. I am not, so I did not know that “On Beauty” is, as Smith says, an homage to “Howard’s End,” by E.M. Forster.

“This is a novel inspired by a love of E.M. Forster, to whom all my fiction is indebted, one way or the other,” Smith wrote in her acknowledgments.

Though I have not read the Forster novel, I feel confident that Smith used on old frame for her dazzling portrait of America and Britain. Her voice in the novel is distinct, and the reflection of 21st-century trends on the characters could only be done by a great author like her.

Her greatest talent seems to be characterization. She always finds just the right details to shape a character, to make one come alive. One place I felt this quality was a scene at a Mozart concert: Belsey’s daughter Zora, an aspiring intellectual, is listening to a tape of a scholar explaining the significance of each movement, rather than listening to the actual music. “Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes,” Smith wrote. “It was the same in Paris: so intent was she upon reading the guide book to the Sacre-Coeur that she walked directly into an altar, cutting her head open.” This is one of those moments where, even though you don’t know the character this well, you think, “That is just like her, just how I imagined.” But this also leads to one of Smith’s faults in the novel. Sometimes she creates a perfect character and doesn’t really know what to do with him. It’s as if she throws in a lot of characters without having a big enough net to catch them all. Some of the minor characters seemed to fade rather than flourish.

However, that was only true of some of the minor characters. The main characters are well developed. Smith saves Belsey from being entirely unlikable by creating a perfect story for his down-to-earth wife, the most fully realized character in the novel.

The fact that Kiki has stayed with Belsey so long makes you think there must be some redeeming things about him. And in the end, you see glimpses of that. The ending doesn’t work on all levels, but it does on the most important one: in rounding out the relationship between Belsey and Kiki. It’s certainly worth the 443 pages to get there.

Final Grade: A-