Zadie Smith's first novel, "White Teeth," was a revelation. Published when she was 24, it was a blunderbuss of a novel, set in contemporary multicultural London, and dealt with the messy issues that surround us -- religion and class, intermarriage and sex, growing up and growing old, and constructing identity, family and community in a post-everything world.

		"ON BEAUTY" By Zadie Smith Penguin Press ($25.95)

In her third novel, she continues her search for absolutes in a relativistic world, and also pays homage to E.M. Forster's "Howards End" while upping the ante.

In that novel, Forster explored the barriers that class imposed on the ability to achieve intimacy.

A hundred years later, Smith borrows Forster's plotlines while winking at "Howards End" occasionally, but manages to construct a story that incorporates the issues of race, adultery and professional jealousy.

The novel opens in the home of Howard Belsey, a professor of art history, a reluctant Rembrandt scholar and an Englishman at a college not too far from Cambridge, Mass.

Howard is married to Kiki, an African-American woman who has recently learned of his infidelity and is deciding what to do.

He must go to London to head off the marriage of his older son, Jerome, to the daughter of his rival, Monty Kipps, an ultra-conservative Christian scholar whose work on Rembrandt is more highly regarded.

Smith is an impressive ventriloquist. She portrays a number of characters with equal emotional strength and insight, moving seamlessly from a 57-year-old British man struggling with middle-aged angst to an 18-year-old American kid ready to the privileges of his middle-class background.

Smith's other talents include an enormous sense of wit, a facile prose style and the confidence to tackle huge concerns. Unfortunately, her reliance on "Howards End" eventually gets in the way of her story.

Forster's work symbolizes the traditional prerogatives of imperial Britain and the class structure that supports it. The central question of that book -- who owns England? -- is prescient in light of World War I and the social reorganization that occurred after that debacle.

In Smith's book, the central plot device is a Haitian painting stolen by Belsey's youngest son, Levi. But the symbolism of the painting is harder to discern. Does it represent a kind of cultural imperialism, or has beauty replaced real estate as an kind of postmodern absolute?

Indeed, as the novel progresses, Howard's problems with promiscuity and discerning artistic merit ultimately fade in importance.

Instead, our attentions turn to Kiki and Levi, who, at 18, longs to be Haitian, dirt poor and troubled.

As in "White Teeth," Smith's genius for creating memorable characters, scenes and relationships makes this an enthralling read.

As in our own lives, I suspect, she is less capable of coming to firm resolution or satisfying conclusions. But there are far worse things that being entangled in a book that wryly reflects our own indecisive, inchoate selves so beautifully.