character growth

So. On Beauty. I guess I kind of thought that the Kipps' would turn out to be OK people and that they would sort of stand apart as a moral standard. I guess that didn't pan out. I think that the fact that Monty could not hold up hid moral standards makes us feel kind of jaded. It certainly made me feel jaded. I think we got the first sense of this immoral pervasiveness when the Kipps family holds back Kiki's inheritance. I think that Kiki getting the painting could be construed as the passing on of the factors that make an woman a strong woman. Carlene was a really strong woman; I mean, she hid the fact that she had cancer from her family while always putting them first. When Kiki gets the painting she gains the courage to find herself outside of her failed marriage.

I think that the way the book ends implies that there is no family that can go totally unaffected by the bad judgment of one of it's members. We see this in the beginning of the book when the teenagers hookup. I think that Levi is coming into his own at the end. He has see-sawed between extremes, and so now is finding a balancing point. He was a kind of “hipster” “street” black pretender at the beginning and then tries to authenticate himself by fighting for the Haitians in less than legal ways.

I think that Zora has also really come into her own. She has stopped sort of idealizing the professors in general and her father especially. I think the episode might be Zora's last foray into campus politics. At least, I hope that this has opened her eyes to what a screwed up process that this can be.