I Feel Like A Dinosaur

In this week’s New Yorker there is a review of Zadie Smith’s latest novel. I admit I have not read any of her books though I have been aware of her accomplishments. In the article the reviewer mentioned her youth and beauty and multi-cultural background and ventured the opinion that these things alone made her appeal to publishers as being highly marketable. That depressed me.

Zadie Smith is beautiful - her large, dark soulful eyes alone would sell a few hundred books I imagine. She is also very young and, by all accounts, intelligent and a deep thinker. Those are good things but I have to admit I’m depressed about the beauty=marketability comment. I won’t argue with the truth of it, I’m just depressed about the fact of it.

I know we are a youth-obsessed and looks-obsessed culture. It’s a disease. Someone had sent me a link to a web site called Awful Plastic Surgery and it was frightening to see what perfectly attractive looking people had done to themselves just to look better - which they didn’t. When I saw photos of people I had once thought of as beautiful - Melanie Griffith and Farrah Fawcett - and saw what they did to themselves just to hang onto the illusion of youth I could have cried.

But that’s show biz and show biz has always been more looks obsessed than other worlds. I’m still reeling from the awareness that a writer might have a better chance at selling a book if she is beautiful. A writer??? Writers aren’t actors - writers, to paraphrase Harlan Ellison, are something holy.

And I was thinking about Zadie Smith. Obviously she is intelligent, accomplished, skillful, and ambitious. Her latest book itself is titled On Beauty, and according to the review, is beautifully written, if somewhat lacking in actual story, and filled with ideas. How would Smith feel about the reviewers observation that her own beauty made her more marketable?

I don’t know, sometimes I feel like the world and I have gone in opposite directions. I appreciate beauty and am a staunch advocate of the pleasures of the senses but I’ve long believed the old adage about beauty being in the eye of the beholder. I don’t like this new era of marketed beauty, Photoshop-ed models in advertising, child fashion models (of course they’re beautiful - they have no pores!), and herd mentality.

I buy Vogue from time to time because I love textiles and it absolutely amazes me to see what some of the new designers do with them. Plus I absolutely love the articles in Vogue. But I’ve noticed a trend that I have mixed feelings about. Older actresses and models are frequently shown in ads which I love but then they Photoshop all the truth out of them to make them “beautiful”. Look, Andie MacDowell is beautiful no matter how old she is. So is Jessica Lange. And Cheryl Tiegs is my age and still drop-dead gorgeous. PLEASE LET US SEE A FEW LINES!!! Control that Rubber-Stamp tool! Reign in that Blur tool! These are beautiful women who have earned their laugh lines and the character in their faces. Why do we need to deny them that?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m out of touch with life. That’s what happens when you go 12 years without owning a television. I wish Zadie Smith and all the beautiful, young writers well but I hope their success will ultimately be determined by a whole lot more than their marketable faces.

Thanks for reading.