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On Beauty and Being Wrong: Chapter 8
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Beauty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Beauty
Politics in Academia
Race and Identity
The Value of Family
Summary
Analysis
Zora is persistent, and over the course of two weeks, she sends Claire 34 emails in support of the unenrolled students in her poetry class, like Carl. Although Claire agrees with Zora, she’s overwhelmed by all the emails and calls Erskine in to help her. Erskine promises Claire that everything will be fine—as much as Zora makes a fuss about things, she’s always quick to move on to the next topic.
Once again, Claire finds herself the victim of her own success. While previously she was haunted by her more famous early poems, now she finds herself haunted by her success at drawing Zora into her cult of devoted students. Erskine’s outside perspective allows him correctly see that Zora is so enthusiastic about helping students like Carl in the moment that Zora will never be able to sustain interest in the long run.
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Claire is pessimistic, believing the faculty board will vote next month and force her to kick Carl out of her class. As Erskine leaves, he contemplates helping Carl out by doing what Erskine usually does for anyone who causes him problems: making up a job for them.
Erskine may not be the most morally upstanding character in the novel, but in his own way, he understands how to play academia’s politics better than almost anyone. Here, he has selfish motivations but ultimately ends up helping Carl.
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Carl gets a job as the hip-hop archivist at a Wellington library. He enjoys the pay and how he doesn’t even have to dress up for work—in fact, people seem to respect him more when he dresses more casually. For his job, he gets a budget where he can decide which new CDs the library should buy each month. People congratulate Carl for getting paid to do nothing, but Carl believes his job is a big deal, based on the wordy welcome letter that Erskine wrote for him.
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Carl is enthusiastic about the job, coming in more often than he’s scheduled and suggesting major improvements to the archive. Erskine, however, is never available for a meeting to hear Carl’s suggestions. Zora often stops by Carl’s office to tell him she’s still working to keep him in Claire’s class, and Carl doesn’t have the heart to tell her he doesn’t even care if he can stay in the class.
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One day when Zora comes to visit Carl, there’s a noisy protest related to Haiti going on outside. Zora tries to tell Carl she’s proud of the work he’s doing, but Carl thinks she’s patronizing him. Carl wants Zora to go, so eventually, she helps him close the window to stop the protest noise, then leaves.
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Meanwhile, Victoria sends Howard some emails with lewd photos as attachments, and Howard can’t stop thinking about them. He gets a hotel room where he can meet her. As the two of them are in the room and starting to get undressed, a Black woman in her fifties who works as a cleaner at the hotel accidentally walks in on them. The woman tries to apologize but doesn’t speak perfect English, and Howard gets embarrassed at how angrily Victoria scolds the woman. When Victoria tries to resume having sex, Howard says he can’t do it.
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