The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

On Beauty by Zadie Smith is an astoundingly good book. It’s more controlled than the excellent White Teeth and just as funny. It’s modelled after Howard’s End, so you have to give her the benefit of the doubt for a couple pages as she begins ‘with Jerome’s e-mails to his father,’ but once the story gets going it’s trully amazing to watch as two very different families come crashing together. As I wrote to my wife after finishing it at two a.m. this morning, it’s so good it makes me jealous.