Today, one distinctive kind of bullshit is generated when a leading literary luminary (usually a novelist) is commissioned by a high-minded magazine (usually American) to pontificate at length on a political issue, or worse, cultural “moment”. The genre showcases the novelistic treatment of contemporary politics. And though the sentences are usually syntactically clear, and the articles, at first sight, apparently thesis-driven, the reader quickly remembers that appearances can be deceptive. The characteristic sleight-of-hand of this brand of bullshit is, under the pretense of heading toward a sophisticated conclusion, to assert virtually nothing at all. If there is artistry involved, it is the kind of artistry that consists in presenting completely banal conclusions as if they were hard-won insights, usually by burying them under a heap of diversionary material.

Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive, exemplifies the genre to a tee. It is a well-packed flower press of literary bull pats. Though better known as the award-winning writer of novels including White Teeth and On Beauty, Smith has found a new groove — or rut, depending on your point of view — in churning out think pieces for high-minded longform publications, on everything from the Middle East, to the 2024 presidential election, the immigration crisis, Stormzy, Tár, and the wayward political influence of Silicon Valley. Reading them is enough to make me wonder whether English students should not be educated in the style of firearms officers: provided with the basic skills of the trade only under the heavy proviso that they will hopefully never have to make use of them outside the classroom.

Dead and Alive? Even the title is faintly annoying. But Smith’s passing over the more naturally disjunctive “dead or alive” in preference for a title that needlessly flirts with inconsistency is wholly in keeping with the spirit of her essays. These, she admits, “tend to employ a lengthy and sometimes oblique way of thinking”. Smith is by her own admission suspicious of the kind of “clear, legible, ultimately deadening sentences” she associates dismissively with social media, certain styles of politics and journalism, and academic writing. She admires prose that is “serpentine, hard to parse”.

Of course to the uninitiated reader the effort to valorize unclarity and circumlocution might look like just that: the attempt to present as a stylistic virtue what is in fact a literary defect. And it’s an approach that’s got Smith into trouble before, most notoriously in March last year, when a New Yorker essay of hers, “Shibboleths” (re-collected here), seemed to many to draw several shaky moral equivalences between the norms appropriate to warfare and those appropriate to campus politics.

But that essay is a much more confused object than that parsing of it suggests, and quite representative of the collection in that respect. To her, Columbia University’s anti-Israeli protestors were both “heroic” and in the grip of motivations that were “cynical and unworthy”. In one critical posture, Smith finds the arguments of both sides vapid and politically impotent: “All of that was just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless.” Then, taking up another diametrically opposed stance within the space of a few paragraphs, she grandiosely reminds her reader that, in this political arena, “language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction”. What, then, the reader is left thinking, does Smith think words are? “Unreal” and “meaningless”, or WMDs? They can’t be both, surely? Most likely, they are neither.

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Smith is in fact a talented draftsman of tendentious moral equivalences and assorted analogical relations of doubtful standing. Aren’t the “parallels between twenty-first-century climate denialism and nineteenth-century rationalizations of plantation slavery” vivid? Isn’t Elon Musk’s twitter algorithm a bit like Nazi propaganda, only more effective? Participating in the celebrations of England fans at the World Cup, Smith is reminded of “Nazi delirium” yet again. Uncontrolled immigration may seem to be a political problem, but aren’t “all human social arrangements… inherently problematic”? Almost always, these wild inter-connections serve to obstruct, rather than clear the way for, a developing line of thought. In fact, Smith is disarmingly upfront about her lack of argumentative ambition in Dead and Alive. “All I want to do is demonstrate what a certain kind of thinking looks like”: that kind presumably being vaguely paranoid, flighty, and easily morally distracted.

Sometimes, the intellectual morasses Smith traps herself in concern her own specialism — language itself. Possessed of the writer’s occupational hazard, she overestimates how many political and social problems are fundamentally linguistic in nature. On cultural appropriation, she writes: “What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not ‘cultural appropriation’ but rather ‘interpersonal voyeurism’ or ‘profound other-fascination’ or even ‘cross-epidermal reanimation’? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even furious – but I’m certain they would not be the same.” To give Smith credit where it’s due, a world in which a phrase like “cross-epidermal reanimation” had successfully entered the popular lexicon would indeed be a very different one, perhaps unrecognizable.

When prompted, perhaps by an editor, or her own residual nagging sense that something recognizable as a conclusion is owed to the readers of her meandering think pieces, Smith’s response can be a superior kind of outrage that she should be called upon to affirm anything as vulgar as a settled position. She huffily concludes her Gaza piece: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” With the possible exception of “useful”, the risk is that the reader will take Smith up on her thoughtful invitation, and apply all of these, not exactly mutually exclusive, labels to her in light of her painful, self-regarding style of equivocation.

Smith isn’t even very consistent on the question of whether everything is complicated. You see, some things, according to her, are shockingly simple. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong things. Addressing a crowd of Extinction Rebellion protestors gathered on Tufton Street, London’s home of free-market think tanks, Smith denounces “common sense fiscal conservatives” (to her mind, apparently, anyone who thinks environmental factors should be balanced against economic interests in determining climate change policy) as unequivocally “evil”. Moreover, those “tech” bros who believe climate change should be met with technological innovations are “purely sociopathic and ideological”. The various protestors committing criminal offenses under the aegis of Extinction Rebellion, on the other hand, are bravely taking on a “level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us”.

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Unimaginable, that is, including to Smith. She is quite adept at pulling off selective failures of imagination when the moment calls for them. When invited to commit “an arrestable offense” by her fellow protestors, Smith has, hilariously, to decline. Risking arrest or conviction, you see, would make flying to New York so much trickier, perhaps even “impossible”. In fact, despite declaring that she is “trying to fly less”, scattered clues in Dead and Alive suggest that Smith spends a lot of time in the air, suspended midway across the Atlantic. London, New York, Germany — then off to Austria to collect a literary prize and make some more remarks about the alarming “rightward turn” of politics. The metaphorical richness of this repeated image — the celebrity novelist, entirely ungrounded, resolutely detached from reality — seems not to register with her.

Those cascading frequent flyer points are not the only respect in which Smith fails to live up to her own evaluative ideals, nor in the end the most damning either. As she indicates in an early essay, the simple heuristic by which she is disposed to assess artistic work is the simple question, “Is it interesting?”. Yet, time and again, Smith falls hopelessly short of that standard. Should the reader go to the sometimes considerable effort of extracting her background political positions from the thicket of evasion and complication, virtually nothing beyond the boilerplate, politically preening and utterly unserious is to be discovered. Her incidental political remarks are sub-Guardian-esque.

The Tories “want us to return to a medieval feudal state” and are only interested in “making millionaires billionaires”. Stormzy is what a real “leader looks like”. Smith is bemused to see shoplifters on British high streets: “people seizing their reparations from global capitalism and walking straight out the door.” She lambasts Boris Johnson for “partying” while people’s “relatives died of Covid”. She uses the phrase “differently abled”, apparently without irony. Once or twice, she accurately senses that she is “irrationally attached to a nostalgic politics more suited to the past than the present”. She longs for the “glory days” of the NHS in the late Nineties. She is a sentimental pessimist about AI. She shuns social media — the glow of the iPhone screen is to her a “deathly Palo-Alto-late-capitalist-consciousness-colonizing-sickly-blueish-light”. Perhaps she is also vaguely aware that in the straight-shooting discursive world of online commentary, the wilfully “oblique” takes of literary luminaries might be more easily unmasked as the often irrelevant contributions they are.

As the reader may have come to anticipate, Smith can’t make her mind up on the question of whether artists and writers ought, actually, to be interesting. (One “myth” she suddenly seeks to puncture is that “the great writer is somehow inherently more interesting than other people. He has a unique consciousness, a special way of seeing. We reward him with a book contract. I don’t buy any of that.”) Unfortunately, simply releasing oneself, however contradictorily, from the obligation of being interesting is not a way of becoming so. In fact, it is a way of being quite dull. You can see why magazine editors might see it as an inspired commission to have a prized writer weigh in on current events: the promise that the drab materials of workaday journalism will be elevated under the novelist’s unpredictable, imaginative gaze. Of course, a danger is that the process leaves you with the vices of both genres, and the virtues of neither.

Mainly set in the ethnically diverse working-class area of Willesden, Smith’s multigenerational saga traces over 30 years the intertwined lives of three families: the Anglo-Jamaican Jones’, the Bengali Muslim Iqbals, and the secular Jewish Chafens. The novel mainly explores the ambiguities and anxieties of the immigrant experience, but what is particularly striking is the sanguineness throughout — a sense of possibility that seems quixotic in a post-Rochdale, post-BLM and post-Southport Britain. Even if it wasn’t wholly emblematic of contemporary Britain at the time, the book seemed to reflect what Britain could become. Reading White Teeth today feels like discovering an artifact of what the late social theorist Mark Fisher called a “lost future”.

Like any good post-modern novel, White Teeth is anarchic. The search for a pure, uncontaminated identity is flung aside and so is the past — “what is past is prologue”, writes Smith in homage to Shakespeare. As Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi had already tested, the immigrant experience in multicultural Britain with all its contradictions was the right subject for the post-modern novelist. But by White Teeth, cultural hybridity is not only normal but almost mundane. The O’Connell pub where Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones regularly meet is owned by an Arab Muslim immigrant. Children have names such as Danny Rahman and Quang O’Rourke, while the dialogue incorporates Creole and Bengali.

Around halfway through the novel, the narrator declares “this has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white”. A far cry from the high days of empire when the vexed questions of pluralism and difference were relegated “over there” in the colonies. Now those questions were coming to the metropole itself via migration, and transforming it. As Stuart Hall put it: “One day the world is going to wake up and discover that whole areas of life in Britain, in spite of Conservatism and Little Englandism, have been transformed… a kind of hybridization is happening to the English, whether they like it or not.”

White Teeth did at least acknowledge the cost of this cultural hybridization for both the native majority and the immigrant communities themselves, the latter of whom fear “dissolution, disappearance”. But the book should be read above all as the literary apotheosis of Blair-era multiculturalism. It was written in that brief age of innocence after the “End of History” and before “the age of horrorism” inaugurated by 9/11. In this narrow window, neoliberal globalization seemed triumphant and irrefragable, propped up in the academe by Homi Bhabha’s notion of “cultural hybridity” and the Blair government’s transformative immigration policies. This was an occasion to be celebrated.

Britain was steadily redefining its identity and national narrative to take into account its changing demographics. It was recast as a “nation of immigrants”, with white Britons transformed from longer the universal subject of the nation to one ethno-racial group among a host of others. “Britishness” evolved from an imperial identity tainted with racism to a civic national badge that, like Americanism, could accommodate hyphenated identities. The HMS Windrush was reimagined as a Mayflower-like ship, founding the “new” multicultural Britain. In the same year as White Teeth came the Parekh report. Commissioned by Runnymede Trust, it called for Britain to officially declare itself as a multicultural nation composed of a “community of communities”. This notion of multiculturalism went beyond a descriptor of pluralism in British society and was turned into an ideological principle and political creed to manage this plurality. For Runnymede, multiculturalism proclaimed to provide a broad framework of a new common belonging where “all citizens are treated with rigorous and uncompromising equality and social justice”, but “cultural diversity is celebrated and cherished”.

What better figurehead for this exuberant age than Zadie Smith whose debut unleashed genuine hysteria upon release? Growing up on a council estate and ascending to Cambridge University, she was the perfect example of the “multicultural writer” fit for modern Britain. Unlike her saggy-faced, hoary predecessors, the then 24-year-old mixed-race Smith was culturally versatile, writing as splendidly on Dostoyevsky and E. M Forster as on hip-hop and Game of Thrones. It’s easy to see why The Telegraph dubbed her “the George Eliot of multiculturalism”.

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And herein lay the appeal. For all of its multicultural reputation, White Teeth comfortably fits within the tradition of the English novel — how reassuringly English it feels at every step. Like generations of refined English authors before her, Zadie Smith had read her Eliot, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Her humour, too, is mordantly English — the proletarian wit of her North London background tempered by Oxbridge bookish irony. Some assumed that White Teeth was subverting the traditional English novel, through themes of race, gender and colonialism which expressed a new multicultural subjectivity, creating a sense that Smith was possibly radical and edgy. But for anyone who dares to set aside her ethnic origins, it’s clear that Smith’s cultural context is as establishment as it gets. She became a fellow at Harvard while still in her 20s.

Smith has long been a privileged transatlantic liberal. So much is clear from the positions she takes whenever she wades into politics. She publicly supported Obama, the political apogee of what she had been writing for years in fiction. She then opposed Brexit, scolding Corbyn for his Euroscepticism. But perhaps the illusion was finally shattered last year when her New Yorker essay went viral. Writing about the pro-Palestine campus protests in America, she called the protesters “cynical” and “unworthy” for not considering that Jewish students may find their actions threatening and for promiscuously labeling their enemies Zionist “as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith”. Her long-standing admirers accused her of rationalizing genocide and being a “liberal both-sider”, with novelist Michael Magee summing up the mood: “we lost Zadie.” A mixed-race author of novels that meditated on the post-colonial condition turned out to be insufficiently anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. In other words, they discovered she was just another liberal — but she always had been.

This is why, at the turn of the millennium, White Teeth was comforting for British liberals anxious about this unprecedented epoch in British history. A novel that both hypothesized, and by its own existence seemed to prove, that not only could multiculturalism truly succeed, but that it could succeed without making Britain any less recognizably British. The collision of different peoples and cultures once separated by geography and history but drawn together by imperialism and globalization would, so the story went, bring about something new yet familiar. But 25 years later, such hopes seem misplaced. Multiculturalism is now “dead”, no longer seen as a source of freedom and unity but as a harbinger for ethnic conflict and sectarianism. Like a shrine to Jupiter in the decadent years of Imperial Rome, multiculturalism appears now as a relic of a civic religion that virtually everyone has ceased to believe in.

As a form however, historical fiction is bristling with risks. Most saliently, anachronisms — to be pointed out by pedantic readers. The exemplar in such matters is Charles Dickens. A draft of his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), contained a minor character who was hanged “for passing bad one pound notes”. A correspondent who had seen the proofs wrote to inform him that it was only after 1797 that notes under five pounds were issued; Barnaby Rudge was set in the lead-up to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Dickens checked, assented, and replied to this Victorian pedant, wishing him: “Very many thanks… for your kind care.” (It’s noteworthy not just that he was grateful but that he took care to double-check first.)

Dickens is himself a minor character in Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, a work of historical fiction set in the 18th and 19th centuries, partly in the bit of northwest London which has inspired most of her non-historical fiction and partly in Jamaica, the narrative spreading over multiple characters and storylines. There is, to start with, the world of the real (but largely — and deservedly — forgotten) novelist William Harrison Ainsworth: his numerous but terrible books, his smug self-satisfaction and his complex domestic arrangements. These are sardonically observed through the eyes of his cousin and housekeeper Eliza Touchet — which Smith takes her to pronounce, with Dickensian aptness, “touché”. But Mrs Touchet’s attention is distracted, like that of countless others in England, with the (also real) cause célèbre of Arthur Orton, a butcher who implausibly claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-missing heir to a large inheritance.

But the Tichborne affair, wild from start to finish, provides Smith with her situation rather than her story. Her plotline — or the best of her several — is the one woven around the Tichborne Claimant’s star witness: a Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle who insisted, even when there was little else to support Orton’s claim, that he recognised Sir Roger, a man he had once worked for. Bogle’s own story — of his enslavement and his freedom — ends up being as or more interesting than that of the other people involved in and those breathlessly following the Tichborne Case.

Smith’s handling of Bogle involves a deft synthesis of fact and fiction. And the book comes with a short paragraph acknowledging Smiths’ principal academic sources and thanking one scholar of the period in particular for having read the book in manuscript. Being at best a part-time student of this period, I suspect that I will only embarrass myself if I go about seeking anachronisms. But in any case, this isn’t the sort of book whose interest in history starts and ends with getting the facts right. If that’s all there were to it, why bother fictionalising it at all?

Much mainstream historical fiction does engage in that lower literary pleasure Smith warns of: “cosplay”. And what man doesn’t look better dressed in Mr Darcy’s shirt, or Sir Lancelot’s armour, than in a tracksuit? But historical fiction of this kitschy kind — Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels are the recent exemplars — also gives us the chance, rare in the modern world, to look at the world through concepts few of us can use today without irony: chastity, honour, vengeance. The popular taste for this sort of fiction, and indeed for the pseudo-medieval worlds in which much fantasy is set, tells us something about our longings for a world before liberal democracy, before “health and safety”, before political correctness.

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But these aren’t Smith’s reasons for succumbing to the lures of history. She evidently intends to write the less kitschy sort of work associated with Hilary Mantel, and before her, Penelope Fitzgerald. Smith is a talented parodist, as anyone would need to be who dabbles in this genre. But a book that contained nothing but parody would be a wearying thing. That is itself a reason why the pedant’s impulse to read with an eye to anachronism misses the point of the best historical fiction. Here, for instance, in a passage describing the Jamaican witness, Bogle, accompanied by a mysterious teenager, appearing before a curious public, is Smith letting us know that she can write “period” when she wants to:

“He [the son], too, was a negro, but of lighter complexion. His extraordinary hair… had been shaped into a pair of triangular wedges, one pointing up, the other down. Surely a son: they had the same narrow, almost Oriental eyes. But where Bogle’s were a shrewd exception in a soft and inconclusive face, the boy’s flashed round the room like lightning.”

The racial terms — “negro”, “Oriental” — are not, of course, Zadie Smith’s, but those of Mrs Touchet, the Victorian character through whose eyes we’re viewing the scene. The same goes for the description of the boy’s “extraordinary” hair, and the inference she — and we — make: “Surely a son.” The clichéd simile at the end, as Smith allows Mrs Touchet herself to observe, is like something from the hackneyed prose of her cousin, William Ainsworth. Lovers of Victorian fiction will recognise Smith as one of them; she has read the same books they have, and doubtless a good many more.

What, then, of Smith’s contention that historical fiction might come at history from an “interrogative angle”? That isn’t true only of historical fiction; it is what any historian worth his salt does anyway. Not even the most vulgar kind of historical narrative can be simply a list of facts about the past. They must be held together by something, usually a question: not just “What happened?” but “How?” and “Why?” And there’s no anachronism in approaching the materials of history — documents, oral testimonies, archaeological remains — with the questions and concerns of the present. Indeed, that approach is what produces the kind of history we can learn something from, an account of the past that has something to tell us. It only produces bad history when it turns out that the past tells us exactly what the present tells us.

Zadie Smith’s own life, lived under the glare of public scrutiny from her bestselling debut, White Teeth, published in when she was in her early 20s, can encourage the view that her concerns are “presentist” in the bad sense. She was for many years, as she has self-deprecatingly described, British fiction’s “multicultural (ageing) wunderkind”. Sceptics put down her success to everything other than the quality and popularity of her books: her mixed racial heritage, her striking appearance, and her flattering the right-on political prejudices of the Anglo-American chattering classes.

These judgments really are unfair, and readers tempted to hold them should try (for evidence of her literary seriousness) her essays on E. M. Forster and George Eliot, (for evidence of her political unclassifiability) her dark and haunting short story about a West African woman effectively the slave of a Muslim family “The Embassy of Cambodia”, and (for evidence of her insight as a critic of contemporary culture) her reviews of such films as The Social Network and Tár. And similarly, the pages of The Fraud are not filled with Left-wing clichés, but ask questions that were always there to be asked about the past.

For instance, one doesn’t need to overstate how many black people there were in Victorian England to be curious about the lives of the small number there indubitably were. A lovely passage in this book has Mrs Touchet take notice of “a band of Ethiopian minstrels” who “had joined forces with a chaunter, singing the broadside he was selling for a penny a sheet” — a simple image of a real London scene that doesn’t need analysis. One can see the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a real evil while acknowledging the complicity of African elites in it and indeed that its abolition, while a real achievement, was only the beginning of a process of emancipation. As Mrs Touchet puts it to a too-complacent dining companion, “No, Mr Chapman, it is not at all an end to the matter. The plantations remain in operation. You might as well say the fire is out while a man still roasts atop the coals.”

It is impossible to avoid the echo of 21st-century activist slogans when we find that there were working-class Londoners, used to being patronised by the legal system, carrying signs that read “BELIEVE BLACK BOGLE”. But Smith allows the reader to entertain the full range of possibilities — that Bogle was the schemer behind the whole affair or that he was in earnest but mistaken. The question of who took Bogle’s testimony seriously is interesting quite apart from the question of whether he was, knowingly or not, lying. The past is, in that sense, exactly like a foreign country. The Mikado has virtually nothing to do with the real Japan because its Japanese setting was never supposed to be anything other than a proxy for England — the real target of Gilbert and Sullivan’s gentle mockery. By the same token, if a novel’s historical setting is supposed to be more than merely incidental, it had better have the capacity to surprise the reader.

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Few people today are going to be much surprised by being told that there were black people in Victorian London, that conditions on British plantations in the Caribbean were often dire, that there was a human zoo at the Great Exhibition of 1851. We are told that often enough now. My favourite scene in The Fraud is the one where Mrs Touchet, in raptures at church over the singing of former slaves (“Had she ever truly heard music until this moment?”) is introduced to one of the singers and finds herself disappointed that the lady is less moved than she is by the occasion. “Why was this young lady so determined to behave as if she had done nothing more remarkable this evening than clean a kitchen or serve a meal?”

A young black man, clearly besotted with the singer, wishes to take the singer on a tour of London, to see “our ‘Big Ben’”. Poor Mrs Touchet cannot handle the ordinariness of people she wants to see as “noble sons and daughters of Africa — filled with the grace of suffering, illuminated by freedom”. She feels shamed by their evident desire to be rid of this earnest do-gooder so they can resume their flirtation. This is often the most surprising thing about history: what it constantly tells us about the banal humanity of human beings.

On Beauty is a campus novel, and it’s a book about identity. Howard Belsey is white and English, teaching at the fictional (but very Harvard-ish) Wellington College; his wife Kiki is American and black, and so are his three children. His great rival in his field — which is Rembrandt studies — is Monty Kipps, who is black and Trinidanian-British and (this is perhaps the most important part) a conservative Christian, while Howard is an atheist and a liberal. “Howard,” we learn, “had always disliked Monty, as any sensible man would dislike a man who had dedicated his life to the perverse politics of right-wing iconoclasm”. It is not exactly irrelevant that Monty has published his Rembrandt book while Howard’s is a perpetual work-in-progress.

Their animosity is played out on the field of aesthetics (Howard teaches his students that “prettiness is the mask that power wears”, while Monty says things like “poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized”); it is driven by their ideological differences; and, when Monty joins Howard’s department, it is all forced through the meatgrinder of office politics. By the end of the novel, Howard isn’t holding onto his anti-Monty beliefs from principle—if principle was ever the whole story behind them—but because his career depends on them prevailing. (The same is true for Monty.)

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This is, of course, as things have always been on campus, and it has never mattered very much. Part of the joy of the campus novel, historically, is that the closed world of the university provides a small canvas for the satirical humiliation of small men with petty ambitions living lives of minor hypocrisy — think of Lucky Jim or The History Man. But over the twenty-first century, beefs that were once safely contained in the common room have spilled over into the real world.

Partly that’s down to technology: Howard is a technophobe who won’t use a mobile phone, but his 2020 equivalent is on Twitter all day firing off 37-part BUCKLE UP threads with the intention of destabilising his enemies. The recent scuffle at Cambridge over free speech, which came down to whether opposing viewpoints needed to be “respected” or merely “tolerated”, played out across social media and in the press. The ability to follow — and participate in — academic drama in real time makes all of us bit-players in a campus novel, all the time.

But it’s also because the seemingly arcane business of theoretical analysis turns out to matter very much to how we think about ourselves. Howard’s Marxist analysis of art as power, while not exactly false, asserts a deterministic relationship between who we are and what we feel. At the same time, his children are all living experiments in identity. 15-year-old Levi adopts a kind of universalised political blackness that would deny his middle-class advantages, with an ersatz Brooklyn twang: his gently satirised adventures in identity make him a forerunner of British adherents to the US Black Lives Matter movement, who talk as though Birmingham, Alabama and Birmingham, UK were politically interchangeable. (The people he attempts to make common cause with see through him, of course.)

Howard’s daughter Zora follows her father through the university system with uncomfortable closeness. And most shockingly to Howard Jerome, his eldest, rebels by converting to Christianity and falling in with the Kipps family. Smith describes gorgeously the pleasure that can come from giving up one’s habitual beliefs: “When Monty suggested that minority groups too often demanded equal rights they haven’t earned, Jerome had allowed this strange new idea to penetrate him without complaint and sunk back further into the receiving sofa.” There’s an almost erotic deliciousness sometimes in submitting to the views of the other, and for Jerome, Monty’s refusal to speak according to the script is thrilling.

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The battle for Jerome’s soul only heightens the professional rivalry between Howard and Monty, which reaches a climax over (of course) a question of free speech. Monty has proposed to deliver a lecture series called “Taking the Liberal Out of the Liberal Arts”. Howard — accusing Monty of homophobia, sexism and racism — demands that Monty should give the department a preview of the lectures’ text so they can excise any material deemed counter to the institution’s internal “hate laws”.

Monty rebuffs him, on the obvious First Amendment grounds: “If it will make him feel better — I know how much the liberal mind likes to feel better — I hold myself completely responsible for the contents of the lectures I give.” But there’s another, perhaps even more compelling, argument he doesn’t even need to make, because his skin can say it for him: if Howard’s analysis of power is correct, why should a white man be able to dictate how a black man talks about race?

You can tell that Howard is going to lose the departmental vote on this when a colleague asks: “Is the liberal consciousness […] really so slight that it cannot survive a series of six lectures that come from a perspective other than its own?” The scene feels like the forerunner to every conversation that’s been had over the last 12 months about no-platforming, hate speech and intellectual freedom — not, obviously, because Smith is a soothsayer, but because she delineates a tendency that has since grown to monstrous proportions.

The question of who gets to speak, and for whom, is a pointed one for the novelist. In late 2019, Smith published the essay “Fascinated to Presume”, which was either a defence of fiction or a farewell to it: “what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally,” she wrote. 2020 responded by beginning with a concerted campaign to destroy an author for having the temerity to write Latino characters while being white.

The novel at the centre of that furore (American Dirt) is no On Beauty. Still, the bitter reaction to its very existence — led, depressingly, by other novelists, who seemed like Howard determined to judge the book only as the bearer of a system of power — felt like a rebuke to the entire concept of fiction. As Smith had said in her essay: “The old — and never especially helpful — adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane.”

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But to write fiction is necessarily to invent your way into the other, to think what might be thought by such-and-such a person in such-and-such a situation, no matter how remote from you. Smith is cagy about moral arguments for the novel — art should be pleasurable, not medicinal. Nevertheless, “Fascinated to Presume” points out that to forbid imagining beyond your immediate identity it to forbid the possibility of community: “without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all.”

The first section of On Beauty is called “Kipps and Belsey”, and its epigraph sums up the dysfunction between Howard and Monty: “We refuse to be each other.” By rejecting the possibility of sympathy, they seal themselves into a relationship of mutual destruction. On Beauty, though, asks that we find some compassion for both. This is not necessarily easy: Howard is priggish; Monty is domineering; both would be for it if this novel were set in the #MeToo era. Both of them are wrong. Both deserve at least the justice of being understood.

Of course, On Beauty is a novel of its time, and one detail that feels very 2005 rather than 2020 is that Monty was able to rely on his academic colleagues’ underlying commitment to free speech. The “liberal consciousness” no longer seems to have the same confidence in its own resilience, as evidenced by the backlash to the Harpers open letter on free speech or the hounding of columnist Suzanne Moore at the Guardian for her dissent from the orthodoxy on gender identity. Individuals who find themselves holding unpopular opinions in liberal institutions today are at least as likely to encounter shunning, denunciation and career death as they are principled support.

The room to be wrong — whether that’s allowing someone else to be wrong by your lights, or allowing that you yourself could possibly be wrong — is vanishingly small. Smith’s novel is a window into another way of thinking, where difference can be a pleasure rather than pure threat. It’s also a declaration that pleasure matters. Calls to “decolonise the canon” have a certain justice, but they fall back too hard on the knee-jerk denigration of the “dead white male”. Sure, some are overrated; but what good is a politics that forces you to chuck E. M. Forster in the bin? In On Beauty’s revision of Howards End, Smith meets the other as an equal — irreverently, affectionately — and makes something new.