Set in the fictional New England college town of Wellington, the novel follows the interracial, transatlantic Belsey family - British art historian Howard, his African-American wife Kiki, and their three children - as their lives entangle with those of their conservative intellectual rivals, the Kipps family. A comic campus novel about academia, marriage, race, and aesthetics, it consciously echoes the structure of E. M. Forster's Howards End.
Books mentioned in On Beauty (6)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “With his free hand Howard took a turn-of-the-century edition of Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and brought it with Murdoch to the couch.”
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: “No doubt she had read Lolita.”
The Georgics by Virgil: “You know, what I've always felt is, well, for instance, in The Georgics - ' 'The what?' 'Virgil.'”
The Tempest by William Shakespeare: “'The Tempest.'”
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H. W. Fowler: “...Henry Watson Fowler, the author of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, on whom French had written a colossal, almost painfully detailed biography.”