By Jean M. Deken

In Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “On Beauty,” art historian Howard Belsey - English, bit of a stiff upper lip - is married to Kiki, an African-American earth mother type. Together they are raising three intelligent, high-energy children in a cozy New England college town on the outskirts of Boston. The three college-age children are son Jerome, who has just found Jesus and is passionate about sharing his faith (much to the discomfort of his agnostic parents); awkward, ardent intellectual daughter Zora; and the youngest child, Levi, adrift between the world of relative privilege where he grew up and the beckoning urban, black male street life of hustling, music and brotherhood.

Zora has decided to make her mark - if not by her brilliance then by dint of her unflagging perseverance - at Wellington College, where Belsey has taught for 10 years and is desperately trying to obtain tenure. It is also where the elder Belsey is joined, early in the novel, by a hated rival from England, Sir Montgomery Kipp, who, in addition to being a fellow academic and art historian whose views on art and politics are diametrically opposed to Belsey’s, is a very successful public intellectual and philanthropist and one of the first black men to graduate from Oxford University.

Smith’s characters’ relationships to beauty - how they define it, whether they feel they have or lack it, how they seek to include it in their lives, the value beauty holds for them - are the core of her compelling new novel. She is concerned with what society believes about us, and what we believe about ourselves, based on looks, specific skin shade, hair shape and texture, where we grew up, accent, and clothes.

All of Smith’s wonderfully drawn, fully realized characters seem acutely aware of their own prejudices about who and what is beautiful but only dimly aware of or completely blind to other biases they hold. All are at different points on a journey toward knowledge, and the individual journeys they take in this book are full of realistic and finely nuanced scenes of how they suddenly or gradually - sometimes humorously, sometimes painfully - come to know more about the true nature both of world and of self.

While “On Beauty” is neither a sequel nor an update, it is a delicious, completely satisfying extended riff on the 1921 E.M. Forster classic, “Howard’s End.” It is a book to be read and savored for its wit, humanity and exquisite prose. Like a jazz virtuoso, Smith takes a familiar piece and remakes it, weaving plot devices of the original novel around a decidedly 21st-century story; updating and expanding on themes of class, status, wealth and, in particular, the quest for and the meaning of beauty.

If it is true that “time is how you spend your love,” and you are someone who loves great writing, then you very much need to read this book.