On Beauty / by Zadie Smith

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English-born Howard Belsey is a art history professor at a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts. Over the years he has seen his liberal academic values and leftist ideologies slowly eroded in the face of intellectual conservativism, a fact more acutely rendered through the attitudes and opinions of his long-time nemesis Prof. Monty Kipps. Despite his disappointments, Howard is a relatively satisfied man, married to his African-american wife Kiki and loved by his three college-age kids Jerome, Zora and Levi. Yet a shadow closes over Howard's world when Jerome, his oldest, interns at a college in England where he lodges at the Kipps' residence and, in the process, falls head-over-heels in love with the Kipps' daughter Victoria.

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Though the budding romance between Jerome and Victoria is soon broken off, aspects of the entanglement have re-engaged Howard with instances from a preferredly forgotten past, one which includes incidents of a particularly distasteful nature between he and Monte Kipps. Now with the Kipps planning a move to America (Monte on a visiting professorship), Howard's world seems to be closing in around him. Compounding the drama in Howard's life, though in a more subversive manner, is the fallout from a one-night stand he'd had with a colleague some months previous, the details of which are now painfully known to Kiki and the children along with a select number of intimate peers and faculty members.

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It is from this backdrop that author Zadie Smith, also the writer of White Teeth and The Autograph Man, deftly portrays the intimacies of family situations, relating how the conflicts of relationships and antagonism, race and identity, class and prejudice are all enmeshed in the strata of daily life. Reminiscent of E.M. Forster's Howard's End--Smith apparently adapted aspects of her own novel's key characters from Forster's original two female protagonists--this is a moving novel centered on the complications and comprimises arising out of a growing need for connection in modern life.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Lisa Genova first paid a company to publish and distribute this book to independent bookstores, until she was finally introduced to the right agent and negotiated the book’s official release. Ms.Genova has a PhD in Neuroscience from Harvard, writes for the National Alzheimer’s Association, and is an actress. Her grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and this was the inspiration for Still Alice, her first novel. The book’s heroine is a Harvard professor, Alice, who discovers that she has, at age 49, an early onset of Alzheimer’s disease, which afflicts 10% of all those diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. One of Alice’s first warnings of the disease is forgetting some words of a speech, and this episode is swiftly followed by one in which she can’t (momentarily) find her way home. She sees her surroundings, she knows what buildings are which, but nothing tells her which way to turn. This riveting illustration of how everything can be known but without the connections needed to function kept me reading, committed to the journey’s end. Genova has the credentials to write accurately about the stages and symptoms of Alzheimer's, and about the current medication and life strategies for the patient and family. What most of us lack , however, is not just this specific knowledge of Alzheimer’s that Genova offers in her book, but the ability to imagine what the sufferer is experiencing. The poetic license Genova assumes in writing the book from Alice’s point of view is risky, and not all readers concur in how believable the story is. I found it both convincing and enlightening. I recommend the book, at the very least for inviting us to consider and ponder on how we do persist as individuals, even under the most debilitating of circumstances.