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Intro
Jerome is a student at Brown doing an internship abroad in London, and while he’s there, he stays with the family of Monty Kipps, a deeply conservative Rembrandt scholar who is the rival of Jerome’s father, Howard Belsey. Jerome is infatuated with the Kippses’ seeming closeness, which they credit to their Caribbean heritage. Jerome soon emails his father that he plans to get engaged to Victoria, Monty’s teenage daughter.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Howard is a professor also specializing in Rembrandt at Wellington College, near Boston. He is white and originally from Northern London, while his wife, Kiki, is Black and originally a hospital administrator from Florida. Together, they have three children, with Jerome being the oldest, Zora the middle child, and Levi the youngest. Zora is a student at Wellington College who wants to be an academic like her father. Levi, meanwhile, distances himself from his family, adopting streetwear clothes and a distinct way of speaking inspired by hip-hop.
When Howard hears about Jerome’s engagement, he takes off for England a day earlier than he was planning to (for a work trip) in order to confront Jerome about the engagement. He misses Jerome’s next email telling him that his engagement to Victoria is already off, and this leads to an awkward confrontation between Howard and Victoria’s brother, Michael, who is surprised to learn that the engagement ever happened in the first place. Embarrassed, both Howard and Jerome leave England.
Months later, back in Wellington, Jerome tries to help his family bond by suggesting they go to a Mozart concert. While they’re leaving, Zora accidentally swaps CD players with Carl, a 16-year-old spoken word prodigy. Levi is immediately impressed by Carl’s streetwise attitude. Later, Zora also takes a liking to Carl when she sees him at the pool and realizes how muscular he is.
Eventually, Howard hears that his rival Monty has accepted a position at Wellington College. Howard is concerned about this but soon has even bigger problems when, during Howard and Kiki’s 30th anniversary party, Kiki learns that Howard had a three-week affair with his old friend and colleague Claire (instead of a one-night stand with a stranger, as Howard claimed earlier when Kiki first confronted him about the affair). This revelation makes the already-distant Belsey family even more tense.
While dealing with her husband’s infidelity, Kiki befriends Carlene, the wife of Monty who now lives with her whole family in Kiki’s neighborhood. Carlene and Kiki bond over a mutual appreciation of a Hyppolite painting. Still, Carlene’s actions remain mysterious, and Kiki sometimes worries that Carlene is avoiding her.
While on a vacation in London, Kiki and the other Belseys learn why Carlene’s behavior was so mysterious: she was hiding the fact that she had an aggressive form of cancer, and even her immediate family didn’t know. At Carlene’s wake, Howard has sex with the much-younger Victoria. Carlene left behind a note to give the Hyppolite painting to Kiki, but Monty holds a family meeting where he decides that Carlene wasn’t in her right mind and so the painting should instead stay in his office at Wellington.
After the funeral, back in Wellington, a fight escalates between Monty and Howard over a series of lectures Monty plans to give. Monty casts the lectures as a free speech issue and uses a faculty meeting to rant against liberal concepts like affirmative action. Howard, however, accuses Monty of potential hate speech and points to homophobic positions Monty has endorsed in the past.
Meanwhile, Carl gets drawn into a related campus controversy. While Zora is in Claire’s poetry class, Claire takes them on a field trip to the Bus Stop, where everyone in the class sees Carl perform and is impressed with him. Claire invites Carl to take her class even though he’s not an enrolled student at Wellington. Monty seizes on this issue, believing that it is a waste of university resources to teach a student who isn’t enrolled. Zora sees an opportunity to make a name for herself on campus, and so she starts to campaign on behalf of Carl for his right to stay in Claire’s class.
While the rest of the family is busy with campus matters, Levi loses his job at a music megastore after he tries to organize a strike to protest working on Christmas. He meets some street hawkers who sell bootlegs and is initially impressed by how they seem to be the most “authentic” version of Black culture he has ever experienced before. But as Jerome gets to know a Haitian immigrant street hawker named Chouchou, Jerome learns that things aren’t so simple. While Chouchou meets some of Levi’s expectations about urban Black men, he confounds others, revealing that he taught French literature when he lived in Haiti.
Finally, the scandals on campus reach a climax when Zora learns that not only did her father have sex with Victoria, but also that Monty was having sex with a student intern named Chantelle who is in Claire’s poetry class. At the same time as this news comes out, the Hyppolite painting disappears from Monty’s office, and Carl is falsely accused (when in fact it was stolen by Levi and Chouchou, who were attempting to reclaim a part of Haitian culture).
Both Howard and Monty get to keep their jobs for the moment, but each is revealed as a hypocrite and takes a serious blow to his reputation. Several months after the news of the scandals comes out, Howard signs a form to split his bank account from Kiki’s, revealing that they are in the early stages of separation. Nevertheless, Howard has a chance to at least redeem his career and potentially make tenure at Wellington by giving an important speech on Rembrandt. Howard arrives to the speech late and without his notes, and so instead of giving the speech, he just wordlessly flips through a PowerPoint presentation. Howard notices Kiki smiling at him in the crowd, and he smiles back. Although she eventually she looks away, her smile remains. The novel ends with Howard zooming in on a slide of Rembrandt’s painting of his lover wading into water, Hendrickje Bathing.
