Zadie Smith's third novel is a comic, tender story of two academic families in conflict, and an inquiry into whether beauty, in art and in people, can survive the theories and politics that surround it. Smith modeled its structure on E. M. Forster's Howards End. At its center is Howard Belsey, a white English art historian at Wellington, a fictional elite college outside Boston. He is a theory-bound critic who argues that Rembrandt's genius is a myth, can't finish his book, and has betrayed his marriage. His wife Kiki, an African American hospital administrator from Florida, is warm and perceptive and feels increasingly diminished in the university world. Their three children each search for an identity: devout Jerome, ambitious Zora, and Levi, who adopts the street style of Boston's Black youth and falls in with Haitian activists and vendors.
The plot begins when Jerome falls for the daughter of Howard's nemesis, Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian-British Rembrandt scholar who arrives at Wellington and campaigns against affirmative action. The rival families become entangled in a web of romance, a friendship between Kiki and Monty's wife Carlene, a disputed painting and inheritance, and campus fights over who belongs. One of the novel's most affecting threads follows Carl, a gifted spoken-word poet from the neighborhood whom the college embraces and then discards. Smith satirizes both liberal and conservative pieties with a light hand while taking her characters' longings seriously. The book is about race and class in America, about marriage, and about the difference between explaining a work of art and being moved by it.