On Beauty
A reworking of E.M. Forster's Howards End set in a fictional New England college town. Two families (one liberal, one conservative; one mixed-race, one Caribbean-English) collide over politics, sex, and Rembrandt. Smith published it in 2005 and won the Orange Prize. The comedy is sharp; the marriages are observed with brutal accuracy.
Smith's ear, her famous instrument, goes oddly flat in America: Carl's street poetry and the campus dialogue read like transcription from a distance. Monty Kipps is a cartoon conservative the novel never risks taking seriously, and the Forster scaffolding obliges a finale of stolen paintings and revealed bequests that creaks exactly where Howards End creaked a century earlier.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
