What do you think about this quote “It’s not WHAT I live for, but WHOM I live for”? How do people perceive other people and what does that do when people don’t know themselves, can they relate to other people?We talked about some of the characters:
Levi – youngest, dresses like a punk, neglected, illiterate
Monty – Trinidadian right-wing academic, against affirmative action. Ultra-conservative vocal Christian and Rembrandt scholar whose book has been published.
Carlene – Says it is “not WHAT I live for, but WHOM I live for.” Leaves valuable painting to Kiki.
Vee – Uses her looks and sexuality to get what she wants.
Howard – The only white person in this family tree. A middle-class white liberal Englishman teaching abroad at Wellington. Up for tenure. Rembrandt scholar whose book has NOT been published
Kiki – Sees everyone as impulsive, except Monty. Befriends Carlene just before Carlene’s death. Eventually leaves Howard.
Zora – Met Carl at a Mozart gathering and wants to keep him in class at the college. She blackmails her way into Claire’s class.
Jerome – Falls for Vee when he is living in England.
Levi – Youngest Belsey, dresses like a punk, neglected, illiterate
Carl – Works in music archives. He dates Vee. He’s accused of having stolen the painting.
Claire – Claire teaches Zora’s poetry class. Howard and Claire had an affair.
Here’s a quick summary from Amazon.com:
The two academics have long been rivals, detesting each other's politics and disagreeing about Rembrandt. They are thrown into further conflict when Jerome leaves Wellington to get away from the discovery of his father's affair, lands on the Kipps' doorstep, falls for Victoria and mistakes what he has going with her for love. Howard makes it worse by trying to fix it. Then, Kipps is granted a visiting professorship at Wellington and the whole family arrives in Massachusetts.
Like Smith's smash debut, White Teeth (2000), this work gathers narrative steam from the clash between two radically different families, with a plot that explicitly parallels Howards End. A failed romance between the evangelical son of the messy, liberal Belseys; Howard is Anglo-WASP and Kiki African-American; and the gorgeous daughter of the staid, conservative, Anglo-Caribbean Kipps leads to a soulful, transatlantic understanding between the families' matriarchs, Kiki and Carlene, even as their respective husbands, the art professors Howard and Monty, amass matériel for the culture wars at a fictional Massachusetts university. Meanwhile, Howard and Kiki must deal with Howard's extramarital affair, as their other son, Levi, moves from religion to politics. Everyone theorizes about art, and everyone searches for connections, sexual and otherwise. A very simple but very funny joke; that Howard, a Rembrandt scholar, hates Rembrandt; allows Smith to discourse majestically on some of the master's finest paintings. The articulate portrait of daughter Zora depicts the struggle to incorporate intellectual values into action. The elaborate Forster homage, as well as a too-neat alignment between characters, concerns and foils, threaten Smith's insightful probing of what makes life complicated (and beautiful), but those insights eventually add up. "There is such a shelter in each other," Carlene tells Kiki; it's a take on Forster's "Only Connect," but one that finds new substance here. The men-- Monty and Howard, that is-- both behave badly, and for all their differences, ultimately are more alike than either one of them would admit.
Comment and thoughts we had:
* Both sets of parents seem to have given up on their kids (Howard only gave money).
* It’s interesting to see how people perceive other people - especially when they don’t know themselves. Is it even possible to relate to other people?
* What is it about sisters that brings up “competitiveness”? We had three older sisters in our book meeting and all were able to relate to this aspect of sisterhood.
* Why did the author kill Carlene? Because it shows the family’s true colors. Vee is not a virgin. The family didn’t even notice Carlene was sick. They rip up her will. At her funeral, they tell the fiancé that she is not yet part of the family and Vee is having sex with Howard upstairs!
* Both Carlene and Kiki play the role of being the “rock” for the family.
* The story seems to be the nuances of interactions between people. Being in the moment and enjoying the descriptions kept some people engaged. Others (like me) kept trying to make meaning of each piece that was introduced and tried to see where it was going, but the “frills” were just there to set the conversations and interactions, not to add to the plot.
* There were a few “happy” scenes - like between Carlene and Kiki and when the Belsey siblings meet by accident at the bus stop on that windy day. But most of the other scenes and interactions were painful. All too often, the character’s effort at connection didn’t pan out.
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