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I have to agree with Elise. She said, "At first I just thought, this is nice, well written, with some well-placed allusions to Howards End, and perhaps a similar structure.  As I kept reading, I admit I started to get a little ticked off at Zadie." 
Maybe it's because I am reading one right after the other, but I can't help to think "On Beauty" is inferior to Howard's End. It just seems that Zadie took the plot of "Howard's End" and construed it with 21st century embellishments. I can see how the plot would work in 19th century England because class and wealth were so much more of a division, but I can't quite swallow the modernized version. The e-mails in the beginning of "On Beauty" really killed me; they just seemed so forced and uninteresting. I hope the book gets better as we keep reading.