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Smith emphasizes social class in her novel On Beauty but I think that the implications are a bit different. The world we live in today, and in Smith’s novel is much less claustrophobic than Forster’s world. Maybe it’s just a color issue, where Smith’s focus is on the black intellectual and the black emotive, and the mixed race individual. While Forster mixes classes, Smith mixes race and class -- I think this gives the novel more depth. I think that Smith’s characters are much more relatable than Forester’s characters as well. This may just have to do with the contemporary setting, but I get her song references and inside jokes where I struggled with Forster.

I was trying to lay out the characters side by side and see whom I felt I knew. I think that Levi relates to Helen in his admiration for the marginalized class, but we have a clearer view of how his family sees him. This helps me know him better than I felt I ever knew Helen. I would be hard pressed to say anything negative about Smith’s characterization because I really think she nails people down.

The only connect is emphasized in a clearer way with Levi connecting culturally and socially with the marginalized class. I doubt this would have been possible in Forster’s time. In Smith’s novel you don’t have to romanticize Africa in the margins, it is before you in living immigrant color. The layers of blackness are very interesting to me. The black English intellectual, the southern black, the Haitian immigrant, the biracial intellectual. Only connect almost becomes silly when you think about the access we have to one another in public settings. It becomes less about class standing and more about only connecting the intellectual and the emotive, or even the narrative and the non-narrative.

Danielle Joseph