On Beauty and Being Wrong

Still unemployed, in need of a fax machine and temporarily residing in a decidedly Kinko’s-less neighborhood; it was under these circumstances that I found myself, once again, on the campus of American University last week. My attempt at inconspicuousness was predictably short-lived. The quad was a sea of half-familiar faces, and it was not long before I ran into one of my favorite professors. She asked the inevitable question; I replied with the usual stammered half-sentences about looking for a new apartment, looking for a job and the difficulties of attaining the former when the latter more and more resembles a mythical beast from a fairytale with each passing day. “Well,” she said, “you should be applying to grad schools.” It’s not something I haven’t heard before. My friends, my family members, and most of my professors have all at one point or another thought they glimpsed a little twinkle of academia in my eye. And, like a churchgoing lady going on one last bender though she can feel The Call twitching in her fingertips, I have planned a sad and private sort of rebellion. I am going to take some time off. I am going to get a job. “I am,” as I told this former professor of mine last week, “going to go to graduate school only after I have become disgusted with every other alternative,” the subtext of this disgusting flash of candor disguised as a flippant witticism conceding, It’s not you; it’s me.

Earlier that week, I’d picked up an immaculate used copy of Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty — a total blind buy. I’d been meaning to read Smith for a while, but White Teeth was higher up on my to-read list and I had no idea what this one was about. Despite the mock-precision of its title, On Beauty is about a lot of things — race, class, marriage, poetry, the trappings of neo-liberal rhetoric, New England winters, to name just a few of them. But, more than anything, On Beauty is about the emotional lives of academics. And as a former literature student currently “taking a few years off” to meditate on how thoroughly a life of academia would destroy her ability to experience things like “earnestness” and “healthy human relationships” and, you know, “literature,” I could not have possibly made a more fortuitous choice at that used book store.

I was immediately spellbound by Smith’s style. Her characters are full of life and emotional nuance, and the fluidity with which she weaves in and out of their interioriorities is pretty astonishing, given the wide range of their personalities. She writes characters young, old, black, white, British, American, female, and male with equal sensitivity, peeling away the dead skin of cliche to reveal the more interesting things that lurk beneath. But, beyond that, look at how wonderfully she can poke fun at academics: “[Kiki] called a rose a rose. [Howard] called it an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.” Zing.

I finished On Beauty this evening. I enjoyed it immensely, in spite of a few minor flaws that I won’t quibble about here. Because the best thing about it was the moment in which it found me — trying to figure out exactly what it is I love so much about the things I studied in college and if I can somehow translate that love into a career, sitting like a kid under a big tree during a thunderstorm.

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