'normal subjects': race in zadie smith's novels

Joan Acocella's New Yorker review of On Beauty--which is stubbornly absent from İstanbul bookstores thus far, to the benefit of my bank account but not my patience--is very thoughtful, though she cannot help but mention Zadie Smith's cheekbones (for that, though, I can't blame her--I too am completely mezmerized). On more substantial matters, she says:

...rarely have I seen a novelist explore that intersection—showing how the race-class nexus affects who says what to whom at a party, who wants to go to bed with whom, who pays a call on whom, and brings a pie—more energetically than Smith. This is not an untilled field. Indeed, it is a whole department of the modern English-language novel: the postcolonial department, which was born before Smith was. But she is especially well positioned for this project, not merely by being mixed-race but by being young, and thus having grown up—unthinking at first, taking what she saw just as life—in the ethnic stew that came together only in the past few decades. This means that she can talk about that world without self-consciousness and without fear of seeming racist. Such license may be an extraliterary virtue, but, when it comes to novels about race, I’ll take my virtues where I can get them. Smith, with her predecessors, could help do for blacks what Saul Bellow, fifty years ago, did for Jews; that is, make them normal subjects for the novel, no longer people who have a sign over their heads saying “Jew” or “Black” but regular people, with the same privilege of texture—of self-contradiction and error, and thus of tragic force—as white people.

White Teeth did this for London; what makes me particularly eager to read On Beauty is my interest in how Smith tackles the dynamics of race in America.