On Beauty is Zadie Smith’s wonderful homage to Howard’s End & it provides plenty of parallels for devotees to spot while remaining greatly enjoyable on its own terms. The action has transferred to New Engl&, with some taking place in London, & concerns a pair of feuding families embroiled in a clutch of doomed affairs when the son of an unsatisfied English professor falls for the daughter of a right-wing icon. The professor’s own marriage is in difficulty too. He’s a Rembrandt scholar, who doesn’t like Rembrandt, married to a larger-than-life African-American who’s not quite the sexy activist she once was. When the two families are thrown together the real wars in the background are soon forgotten as their own cultural & personal wars begin in this beautiful corner of America.