Beauty-ful

While I had every good reason to get to sleep early last night, I was instead up until 2:30am reading On Beauty. I am quite enjoying this book.This should not come as a surprise. White Teeth is one of my top ten (or so) all time favorites. It is among the books I will recommend to people, sans caveat.

I was introduced to Zadie Smith in 2001, by a jury-mate on the trial I served on right before leaving NY. She was a very cool, downtown, quiet in that I-Want-to-Know-More-About-You way, graphic designer. I liked her very much until she became the jury hold out who just as quietly refused to compromise on anything. Anything.

Then I didn't like her so much.

But she did tell me about White Teeth.

Zadie Smith and I were born in the same year. Yeah. This fact makes me feel a bit small, but I'm not holding it against her. She's also very beautiful.

But hey, beauty and success are totally over-rated, right?

Anyhow, I think she is a master of the inner monologue. Not in the meticulously detailed and particular manner that Ian McEwan wrote in Atonement, but in an even more human, endearing, equal parts funny and heart-breaking way. There is nothing pretentious in the way she reveals her characters. They are who they are, they just are, flawed and stunning and complex, and then they live and breath and laugh and anguish and sob.

(I'll try to avoid spoilers here.) There is a scene between a husband and wife dealing with the husband's three week affair after thirty years of marriage. The wife is an ample, earthy, sizable black woman--grand in every way. The woman her husband cheated on her with is tiny, pale, taut, and bony. Very white and very small.

And when the wife finally asks the questions she had been avoiding asking, "Why did you choose someone who was as unlike me as anyone could possibly be? Is this what you have been missing all along" it is devastating.

Because that's what we do, isn't it? We note with precision that the person who cheated on us, or left us, or strayed from us, or is with us but looking elsewhere, is looking at something we can never be. They are admiring the tall to our short, the angular to our zaftig, the pale to our swarthy, the easy-going to our neurotic, the logical to our flighty, and even if we know we can never be any of these things, it is glaring and obvious and frustrating and painful to acknowledge this. It was a hard scene to read, but beautiful.

This Salon review says it all better than I can, but there are definitely spoilers here.