''On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the
university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the
culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything
from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision
between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and
relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation
as a major literary talent. "
Zadie, orginally named "Sadie" is half Jamaican, half Brit and is now professor in the creative writing programme at New York University. I want to dive into the world of her work for a number of reasons. Something she said resonates with me. "Not being able to write in the first person was very much about ...self-disgust or anxiety about saying ‘I'...It did seem to me, when I was a kid and also now that I’m a grown-up
writer, that a lot of male writers have a certainty that I have never
been able to have. I kept on thinking I would grow into it, but I’m
never sure I’m doing the right thing." What sticks with me is that it is true that men feel assured about their place in this world, in any profession, in any social setting. And a writer at T Magazine says the same "[T]he authority a male writer assumes doesn’t originate in himself but in the structure of society, which he inherits like a mantle". True, no?
Anyway, as a woman with her feet straddling different societies and cultures---and having to raise a daughter who will no doubt do the same---I want to see what Zadie Smith has to say about it all.
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