Is Beauty Good

A novel of thirty self-contained, stylistically innovative chapters, all of them responding in their own way to the titular question, and all of them written with a power and ingenuity reminiscient of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard.

“We feel pain, says Fritz, because we need to feel pain, it saves us from being burnt, or hurt, or from walking blindly into danger, breaking a bone; but what does a sense of beauty save us from; what purpose is there in our being coruscated by passing uglinesses; there is little that is moral about beauty; or does it reinforce somehow our notion of moral good: is beauty good?”

Is Beauty Good is a novel populated with voices, each musing, in its own way, on the titular question. In thirty short, self-contained chapters set in places as varied as Berlin trams, English gardens, and the tops of mountains, people talk to silent listeners, engage in soliloquy, or else write down their meditations for a stone-deaf man.

Elegiac and ironic, the novel speaks most hauntingly of the loss of the natural world, which is of course related to the loss of all those senses and faculties of appreciation that make us feel alive. The sheer sensuous force of Rosalind Belben’s prose is on full display in this work of uncommon inventiveness and philosophical potency, which recalls the fictions of Virginia Woolf and Thomas Bernhard.