Zadie Smith talks about 'On Beauty'

For Zadie Smith, class in England is comedic and she loves to write about it.

Most author interviews take place either on the telephone or face to face at a suitable venue and respectable time for both parties.

But it is an indication of Zadie Smith's huge popularity — her 2000 debut White Teeth has sold over a million copies worldwide and was made into a television series — that the 30-year-old author was available to talk about her new novel, On Beauty, only from her cellphone at 3:30am New Zealand time as she travelled by train and cab from London to Birmingham for a book signing.

"It's been wonderful but I'm a bit exhausted to tell you the truth as I've been running around a lot, doing readings all around England," says Smith, who describes On Beauty's recent shortlisting for this year's Man Booker Prize as, "amazing. It's taken me a while to get used to it".

On Beauty has been better received than her ill-fated 2002 sophomore novel, The Autograph Man, and Smith is certainly happier with it than she was with White Teeth, which she has said she wrote, "like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault".

Like White Teeth, On Beauty features two interlinked families and both novels are rooted in northwest London, where Smith grew up and still lives.

"I love London, I love the town, but it's more specific than that," says Smith. "It really is about my part of London. I don't want to become a bore who writes only about one area but it really is the root of my creativity and I'm actually superstitious about leaving it physically and mentally."

But On Beauty mostly takes place in New England, where one of the families — the Belseys — lives, and where Smith was based when she taught for a year at Harvard University.

"New England struck me as an incredibly beautiful place physically," says Smith. "It inspired me to try and do that [set a novel in two countries], which was a new thing for me."

On Beauty mostly centres around Howard Belsey, a white English liberal art history lecturer, who has three children with his African-American wife, Kiki.

The novel opens with a trio of emails from the eldest Belsey child Jerome to his father from London, declaring he is going to marry Victoria, the daughter of Howard's arch-enemy, right-wing black British academic Sir Monty Kipps.

Unfortunately, Jerome's romantic efforts are quickly dashed and the two families are later drawn together again with disastrous results when Monty accepts a position at Wellington, the New England university where Howard also teaches.

"I do think it's something you can't write about twice but I do like campus novels," says Smith. "All my life has been spent in universities in one way or another so I'm familiar with them."

Refreshingly unlike many other such campus novels, On Beauty is written equally from the point of view of the student as the academic.

"I was only a teacher for a year but I was a student for a lot longer than that. I tried to draw on that in the book — what it felt like to be taught."

On Beauty is very much a family affair for Smith, who incorporated two poems by her husband, the poet/novelist Nick Laird into the story, one of which also gave the novel its title.

"It's kind of [from that] but there's a lot of books called On Beauty," says Smith. "It's not an original title. There was a book out about six months ago called On Beauty and we had both been reading a book called On Beauty and Being Just [by Elaine Scarry]. It featured an essay called On Beauty, so we both nicked the title. Nick wrote the poem first ... "

It was also Laird who first pointed out that Smith was essentially re-writing Howard's End and she admits in the afterword that the novel's structure owes much to her first love, E.M. Forster.

"It was pretty conscious," says Smith of her inspiration. "The idea for the book came before but once I started writing it, I knew what I wanted to do. It kind of fades in and out and there is no final murder or anything like that. It's more like a fable."

Like Forster, Smith explores the peculiarly English concept of class, although much has changed since the late English author's day as On Beauty highlights how Britain's rigid social structure has transcended racial boundaries through the upper-middle-class Kipps.

"To me class is all about comedy in England and I love to write about it," says Smith. "In England, it is more a question of class than just money. The idea of nouveau riche doesn't really apply in England because we make the separation between money and new money, which most countries don't bother with."

* On Beauty, Hamish Hamilton/Penguin, will be released on Tuesday, $35