On Beauty

Family meals, arguments, and brief moments between characters often take up several pages, while major shifts in time can pass with only a line. This creates a rhythm that mimics the unpredictability of family life, and it also echoes how long even small events can linger in the memory. These jumps make otherwise everyday events feel weighty while pushing bigger structural changes into the background. The novel holds the readers’ attention through focusing on these small-scale interactions while only lightly referring to larger changes that occur gradually across time.

Syntax, too, varies across characters and scenes. Smith uses long, spiraling sentences for characters when they’re deep in  thought, especially Howard and Kiki. These often appear during moments of indecision or guilt. Kiki’s syntax becomes notably slower and more weighted during emotional scenes, and she tends to think in metaphors and similes. Many of the novel's metaphors focus on beauty and the importance of perception in making judgements. This remains true whether it’s a character who is speaking or the narrator themself. 

The diction the characters use also changes often. It’s highly dependent on the speaker and setting, especially as Smith’s characters come from a variety of national backgrounds. Many of them also embody aspects of contemporary Black experience in both London and the Northeastern United States. Howard, Claire, Dean French, and the rest of the (largely White) academics at Wellington often speak with academic vocabulary. They make a lot of references to academic theory or cultural criticism. Their speech feels guarded and abstract, as if they’re hiding behind their intelligence. Kiki, however, uses direct language that reflects her position outside of academia. Although this makes her far more intelligible and relatable to other people around her, she often feels excluded from the highfalutin conversations of her husband and his colleagues. Monty Kipps speaks with clipped authority, and although he’s an academic his dialogue is often a lot more explicit and confrontational than that of the other Wellington professors. Carl and Levi, by contrast, use slang and more casual phrasing. They also often include elements of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) in their speech, as so the rest of the younger generation of Belseys and Kipps. These shifts do not only reflect background. They also suggest how characters want to be seen by their counterparts. Diction, in On Beauty, is a tool for showing distance between people in the same household. It also reinforces the divide between the Belseys and the Kippses.