Previous
Kipps and Belsey: Chapter 6
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in On Beauty, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nature of Beauty
Politics in Academia
Race and Identity
The Value of Family
Summary
Analysis
The concert begins, and Kiki gets lost in the music. She feels self-conscious about standing out, since the other audience members seem to better understand what’s happening—and they also tend to be mostly white. Kiki then notices that Jerome is crying.
This passage once again shows Kiki’s feelings of self-consciousness and alienation. As the previous passages established, it’s not actually clear if the white audience members or Jerome truly appreciate Mozart or if they just like the status of appearing at the concert and know how to appear like they belong. It seems perhaps more likely that Jerome is thinking about Victoria and the Kippses—and the sophisticated lifestyle he lost out on when his and Victoria’s engagement ended—when he’s crying.
Themes
After the concert, Howard is ready to go, but Kiki reminds him that they have to find Levi first. As they’re heading out, a black teenager in a baseball cap (Carl) starts shouting at Zora. Levi is nearby and intervenes to talk to the boy. He finds out that Zora accidentally took this boy’s CD player and he has hers. But when Levi goes to Zora, she thinks it’s a trick to steal her CD player. Levi urges her to play the CD inside as a test, and Howard comes over and gets involved too.
Carl represents the opposite of the Belsey family—the type of streetwise teenager that Levi wants to be but struggles to actually become due to his privileged, suburban background. That Zora assumes the worst about Carl’s intentions aligns her with Howard: they both preach progressive ideals yet think and act based on prejudiced beliefs.
Themes
Zora finally plays the CD, and hip-hop music comes blasting out of it. She realizes it’s not hers and trades with Carl. Levi and Carl talk afterward, and Levi asks about what Carl was listening to. As it turns out, Carl made the CD himself, although he calls his recording “spoken word” instead of rapping. Levi says Carl should call him the next time he hears about a rap concert.
This passage reveals that Zora was seemingly biased against Carl and that this led her to overlook his own mistake. Still, as much as Carl seems at first to embody street smarts over book smarts, he uses the high-culture term “spoken word” to describe his work (instead of calling it hip-hop or rap, for instance), suggesting that the Belseys may be making false assumptions about what type of person Carl is.
Themes
Howard calls over to Levi, and Levi says goodbye to Carl. Howard asks if Carl is Levi’s friend, but Levi says they just met after Zora accidentally stole Carl’s CD player. It turns out that Carl has performed spoken word at the Bus Stop, a venue where Claire Malcolm sometimes goes with her poetry students. Carl has never met Claire, but Kiki says he should. Kiki invites Carl to her and Howard’s anniversary party, where Claire will be, which embarrasses Levi. Carl says he has to get going but that he has Levi’s number.
Earlier, Claire showed a willingness to appropriate Middle Eastern culture by dressing as Salomé. Her regular visits to the Bus Stop suggest that she is also interested in Black culture like Carl’s spoken word poetry. On the one hand, Claire shows more openness to other cultures than someone like Howard, but on the other hand, Claire demonstrates a pattern of wanting to claim other cultures for herself, partly as a way of combatting her own feelings of fading relevancy.
Themes
Get the entire On Beauty LitChart as a printable PDF.
