Although the plot of On Beauty hews remarkably closely to Howards End, Ms. Smith has managed the difficult feat of taking a famous and beloved classic and thoroughly reinventing it to make the story her own ... On Beauty is also a big-city novel (set mainly in Boston instead of London), alive with the cacophony of urban life and animated by a vibrant sense of how people live and talk today — be they upper-middle-class academics, disenfranchised Haitian immigrants, aspirational hip-hop performers or preachy neoconservatives ...Ms. Smith sometimes over-stage-manages her story, but these lapses are quickly steamrollered by her instinctive storytelling gifts, her uncanny ear for dialogue and her magical access to her characters' inner lives ...portrayal of the Belsey children not only reveals the traits and mannerisms they share with their mother or father but also underscores the many ways in which they have rebelled against their parents, eluding familial history and forging identities of their own ... On Beauty opens out to provide the reader with a splashy, irreverent look at campus politics, political correctness and the ways different generations regard race and class, but its real focus is on personal relationships — what E.M. Forster regarded as "the real life, forever and ever.

...On Beauty is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left ... Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial and economic diversity ... Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all-embracing as Wellington, they allow us to view the wildly overplowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle ... However funny some of the couplings, the human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire ... For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries of On Beauty, she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of culture itself.

Her new novel is masterly on almost any level — impressive in its command of every register of English, never tiresome despite its length and astonishingly sympathetic to every sort of human frailty ...center stage stands the Belsey family, arguing, slamming doors, increasingly beleaguered, confused and heartbroken ... As the novel progresses, Smith smoothly shifts into and out of the minds of the various Belseys, as they sigh, quip and agonize against the backdrop of Wellington classes, parties, lectures and faculty meetings ... At times she can be a little extravagant in her imagery...but her overall tone suggests a kindly Voltairean (or, more appositely, Forsterian) tolerance for human weakness. None of the novel's characters is wholly admirable, and yet nearly all are, somehow, loveable ... But after The Autograph Man and now On Beauty, it's evident that Smith is a writer for the long haul, an artist whose books we will look forward to every few years, a real and deeply satisfying novelist. E.M. Forster would be proud.

What makes this novel a bit unusual is that it is conceived as an act of homage to E.M. Forster ... Two families of very different temperaments are forced to confront one another when in On Beauty, as in Howards End, a sudden engagement is announced and almost at once cancelled ... Her characters are down to earth: they are coarse, fat, bald, myopic, have uneven teeth, they talk their own talk, and are, in short, human, living all they can since that’s all they have; but she is nevertheless with Forster because she cares about religion, prophecy, philosophy ... On Beauty is a much less tumultuous novel than White Teeth, and a more sober book than The Autograph Man ... There is a complicated story making up by richness of implication what it lacks in exuberance. The culture of the Boston campus is set among the other cultures such a city harbours.

Among the many tasks Zadie Smith sets herself in her ambitious, hugely impressive new novel is that of finding a style at once flexible enough to give voice to the multitude of different worlds it contains, and sturdy enough to keep the narrative from disintegrating into a babel of incompatible registers ... Still more worlds open up beyond them as their lives unravel out through the genteel Massachusetts college town to which they have been transplanted: Haitian immigrants, hip-hop poets, New England liberal intelligentsia, reactionary black conservatives ... with a knockabout comic style (Dickens, by way of Rushdie and Martin Amis), here the intent is to live more inwardly with her characters, and the model, alluded to throughout, is EM Forster ... the plot of Forster's Howards End, ingeniously re-engineered, underpins much of the storyline of On Beauty ... With the self-righteous Kippses thus plumped down on the doorstep of the self-sabotaging Belseys, the situation has the makings of a small-scale campus comedy with scope for all the familiar farcical posturings so dear to the heart of academe ... Large, Forsterian themes of friendship, marriage (the Belseys' is in crisis following Kiki Belsey's discovery that Howard has been unfaithful), social tension, artistic expression (from Rembrandt to Tupac) are meditated on with an unguarded seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, and to some extent the book could be seen as a rather heroic attempt to dignify contemporary life with a mirror held up in the grandly burnishing Bloomsbury manner ... Beautifully observed details of clothing, weather, cityscapes and the bustling human background of drivers, shoppers and passers-by are constantly being folded into the central flow of thought, feeling and action ... sheer novelistic intelligence — expansive, witty and magnanimous — that irradiates the whole enterprise.

...Smith is back in form with On Beauty, a boisterous novel about two warring families pitched on either side of the liberal-conservative divide. Cloistered around Wellington College (a would-be Harvard just outside Boston), the Belseys fall in line beneath Howard, a theory-clutching white professor with leftist leanings, and Kiki, his African-American wife ... The family's foil comes to town behind Monty Kipps, a visiting Trinidadian professor whose staunchly conservative views — on issues ranging from affirmative-action to the classical canons of academia — drive Howard up a wall ... Instances of infidelity and tin-eared arguments give On Beauty an occasional melodramatic air, but Smith's strengths as a storyteller shine as big events echo small tectonic identity shifts. In the end, On Beauty stands as a rich survey of people living through complex fates that their tidy ideas fail to account for.

On Beauty belongs to the well-established genre of academic comic novels, and it’s openly a riff on Howards End by E.M. Forster, a writer she’s described as her first literary love. Nevertheless, to the mere reader, plunging into On Beauty feels a lot like being Dorothy in the film version of The Wizard of Oz, stepping from the black-and-white Kansas of 2005’s ephemeral literary offerings and into the Technicolor of Oz ... Smith is Rembrandtian (and, for that matter, Shakespearean and Tolstoyian) in her inexhaustible interest in and sympathy for even her most disagreeable characters ... The ideological battles between Howard and Monty (who in the course of the novel comes to work at Howard’s university) may sound, in this polemical age, like the meat of the matter, but they’re only a foil. Howard’s marriage to Kiki, an African-American hospital administrator, is the real substance here ... are greater or lesser examples in a catalog of human folly, but none are depicted without compassion and a certain measure of delight in their vibrant particularity and underlying universality ... Beauty is both powerful and helpless, the university both precious and hellish, ideas both essential and superfluous, people both funny and tragic.

In her third novel, she continues her search for absolutes in a relativistic world, and also pays homage to E.M. Forster's Howards End while upping the ante ... Smith is an impressive ventriloquist. She portrays a number of characters with equal emotional strength and insight, moving seamlessly from a 57-year-old British man struggling with middle-aged angst to an 18-year-old American kid ready to the privileges of his middle-class background ...an enormous sense of wit, a facile prose style and the confidence to tackle huge concerns ... Indeed, as the novel progresses, Howard's problems with promiscuity and discerning artistic merit ultimately fade in importance ... As in White Teeth, Smith's genius for creating memorable characters, scenes and relationships makes this an enthralling read.

Such naked homage seems a little risky at first. Yet On Beauty, a nominee for this year's Man Booker Prize, turns out to be as sly and inventive a recasting of E.M. Forster's masterpiece as one could wish. British writer Smith (White Teeth) takes liberties with the older book's plot about a disputed legacy ... Both her families are black or of mixed race. The action, instead of being confined to England, plays out on both sides of the Atlantic. And the legacy in dispute doesn't concern a piece of real estate ... Smith has a grand time hooking up the players in her big cast of characters in every combination possible ... At different points, many of the characters in On Beauty behave deplorably — yet Smith always sees them in the round, never letting you lose sight of what demons or delusions might be spurring them on, making their behavior make sense to them ... a novel that savvily illuminates the times we're living in.

Smith is such a talented writer that in choosing to pay tribute to E.M. Forster, she has shortchanged her own gifts ... On Beauty has the reader murmuring with admiration and delight at this tale of two families, two marriages, two sets of grown children. Smith's writing flows with intelligence, wit and emotional insight ... Smith's novel starts out beautifully, but by the end, the reader is left thinking that the plot has devolved into a mechanical melodrama overly influenced by the author's desire to honor Howards End. You feel a need to reread Forster not for the pleasure, but to figure out why Smith put her wonderfully drawn characters through increasingly strained plot machinations. On Beauty focuses on two well-off families who come into contact and eventual conflict.

...with her third novel, On Beauty, Smith returns to her fine form as a gifted storyteller and astute cultural critic ...focuses on two families that couldn't be more different ... On Beauty is a broad, sometimes messy novel, full of ideas and unafraid to tackle subjects both lofty and earthy ... Her female characters are brilliant and accomplished but still loathe their own bodies. Her male characters argue articulately about politics and art but still remain in thrall to their own desires. The "mommy wars," rap music, campus politics, love — Smith tackles them all with her characteristic wisdom and humor ... That is not to say that readers unfamiliar with Forster's novel can't enjoy On Beauty; when read in tandem, though, Smith's novel gains even more richness, as it adds dimensions of race and gender to Forster's ideas about class and human connections.

Like White Teeth, this novel squeezes a great deal of contemporary life between two covers. It is packed with tangents on the I-pod, the seepage of pornography into sex life and glimpses of life in America under President George W. Bush ... The Kippses are a righteous, shiny, successful and attractive clan. They also are fervent opponents of affirmative action; and they are black ... Mixed-race and politically liberal, the Belseys are utterly baffled by them ... If these paintings feel somewhat tacked onto the novel, like future reading group guide discussion points, what doesn’t feel forced are the portraits Smith paints of her main cast – particularly of Kiki...the book’s loveliest character ... a novel that is rich and entertaining, and in spite of the ugly truths it uncovers, often quite beautiful.

...the British author returns to biting, frequently hilarious form with a novel that concerns two professors who are intellectual enemies but whose families become intertwined ... As Smith details the generation-spanning interactions of various minorities within a predominantly white, liberal community, she finds shades of meaning in shades of skin tone, probing the prickly issues of affirmative action, race relations and cultural imperialism while skewering the political correctness that masks emotional honesty ... Though much of the plot concerns the hypocrisies and occasional buffoonery of the professors, along with the romantic entanglements and social crises of their offspring, the heart and soul of the novel is Kiki Belsey, who must decide whether to continue to nurture a husband who doesn’t deserve her ... sharp, engaging satire, beauty’s only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone.

'Truly human, fully ourselves, beautiful,' muses a character in Smith's third novel, an intrepid attempt to explore the sad stuff of adult life, 21st century–style: adultery, identity crises and emotional suffocation, interracial and intraracial global conflicts and religious zealotry ...this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End ... Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise ... The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up.