Come together

On Beauty
By Zadie Smith
Penguin, 446 pp., $25.95

With her roots in post-colonial London and her sensibility somewhere between the 19th-century novel and hip-hop, Zadie Smith has managed the sort of fearless exuberance in her fiction that belongs to most young writers' dreams. Her first novel, ''White Teeth" (2000), was published when she was only 24; what the novel lacked in restraint, it more than achieved in span and dazzling intelligence, raw and cultivated. The daughter of a white British father and a black Jamaican mother, Smith wrote ''White Teeth" during her senior year at Cambridge University, employing a mix of academic sophistication and polyglot street smarts that seemed at the time to anticipate a new kind of fiction -- one that thus far belonged mostly to the fellows of contemporary English letters, the Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace types, but that Smith had translated into her own lexicon of range and ease.

''On Beauty," her third novel, follows Smith's less successful 2002 ''The Autograph Man," and this time she has returned full force: The book is a big, garrulous, academic comedy posing as a domestic drama. Or the other way around, if you prefer: It's a dead-serious piece of sprawling realism posing as a comic novel. If its aesthetic ties are to E. M. Forster and to Rembrandt, its cool-girl blues are equally familiar with the ways contemporary London and New England walk and talk: in adolescent dialogue and music, in academic jargon, in the more elusive dialects of the heart. ''One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails," Smith jauntily embarks, thereby tipping her hat to ''Howards End" but dragging Forster's opening line into the 21st century. And if only connecting is the point, too, here that petition becomes a mixed message of effort and rue: ''There is such a shelter in each other," one beleaguered matriarch tells another, each of their worlds -- their undervalued sovereignties of houses, half-alienated offspring, and crumbling marriages -- on far less tenable ground than their female friendship.

The comic foil for most of Smith's lacerating vision is Howard Belsey, a white British 57-year-old art historian and theorist who lacks tenure but hardly the vocabulary to explain his cerebral passions: This is the sort of man who remembers his undergraduate days, nearly four decades gone, as ''those few, golden years when he believed Heidegger would save his life." In stark opposition to Howard is Kiki, his wife of 30 years, a massive black woman from Florida whose strength and opinions are as abundant as her extra pounds. She's a bit too much for Howard, but his desperate need of Kiki eclipses, just barely, his fear of her. When the trappings of Kiki's dominion and his own professional inertia overwhelm him, Howard does the predictable thing and has an affair. Now he's suffering Kiki's stony rage, far worse than anything he can imagine except the lack of her.

Their three children, who steal the show of this novel page after page, are evidence of the best Kiki and Howard ever had to offer each other, in genes and love alike: Jerome, the oldest, who's managed to escape his parents by going Christian; Zora, the righteous young woman trying to define herself by forging a path in Howard's precious academe; and Levi, the youngest -- a fiercely realized and lovable concoction of innocence and jive. (He's grown up in the professional middle class of academic communities, but he pretends to his street brothers that he lives in Roxbury.) Smith spent time lecturing at Harvard in the past few years, and she must have taken plenty of notes while here: The American portion of ''On Beauty" takes place in a college burb a half-hour away from Boston by train, a toy town called Wellington, full of pomp and mock Tudors and Victorians, that resembles Wellesley in name and ambience but whose wider arc has shades as well of Cambridge. Her academic setting -- a second-tier first-rate campus called Wellington College -- is a little universe of back-biting faculty, lugubrious administrators, and terminally dull politics; in this regard, it could be anywhere in America.

And yet Smith has had the good sense to bifurcate her novel's setting, as Howard might say, and place it partly in her native London, where Howard's mortal rival resides, a black cultural conservative named Monty Kipps. When Jerome, on an internship abroad, falls for the lanky, gorgeous Kipps daughter, a girl named Victoria, his impolitic crush throws the two families into one another's paths. This forced encounter only becomes more complex when Kipps (who dared once to review Howard badly) takes a visiting professorship at Wellington. Jerome and Victoria have long since parted company, but now Howard must deal with Monty, Kiki has the luxury of befriending his wife, Carlene, and the younger generation has the task and pleasure of trying to supersede their parents' idiocies.

The college campus is a tempting locale for a novel -- all that intellectual action on a few acres! -- but it also has the potential pitfall of being more locked in than liberating. Smith circumvents this problem by taking her story on the road: to London's Hampstead Heath, to the cafes and streets of Greater Boston, where Levi finds life far more intoxicating than the offerings of Zora's classrooms. And if Smith uses the atmosphere of academe for a few decent riffs on art and theory, particularly concerning Rembrandt, she also has the good sense to use the place as a comic backdrop for Howard's limitations: its glee clubs and ponderous courses on postmodernism and poets in residence who write treatises on the female orgasm. When Kiki tries to engage Carlene in a conversation on a particularly fecund, primitive Haitian painting by invoking some obscure point of Howard's -- the binary nature of a post-Christian world -- Carlene stops her short. ''That's a clever way to put it," she tells Kiki. ''I like her parrots."

Liking the parrots is really what ''On Beauty" is about: finding the beautiful thing that moves you, makes you loyal, makes you go on living. It is a life's education, among all the dialectics and politics and threats of social ostracism, but this path is one to which Smith, and eventually her female characters, adhere. For the real road traversed in the novel is within the emotional sphere, and Smith captures the dynamics of her characters with considerable subtlety and grace: the little betrayals of a long-term marriage, the fear and then courage of a young adult trying to eclipse his or her family's defining strengths, the daily kindnesses that make the hard times bearable. She has made her story wider by introducing a boy from the streets, an autodidact named Carl who knows more about poetry and its insistent beauty than Wellington's poet in residence ever will; and she has made Howard himself tolerable by showing us his working-class roots in Cricklewood, England, that he tried so hard to leave behind. Scratch an intellectual snob, and you'll likely find a boy worrying over his place on the schoolyard pyramid.

Smith has the gift of writing crackerjack dialogue: Her ear is fine and mutable, and she can do street jive and breakfast banter as easily as she does the interminable faculty meeting. But ''On Beauty" is too long-winded. Its actions, external and interior, don't always warrant its pages and pages of speech or description, which can start to feel superfluous and tangential after a while. Still, this is a rollicking and heartfelt story with endurance at its center: ''The greatest lie ever told about love," Kiki thinks, ''is that it sets you free." The same goes for beauty -- for liking those parrots -- but it's a commitment that most of us are willing to suffer, just for being human.