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I think something that's already really grabbed my attention is the way Smith plays with the concept of identity. Within Howard's family, there are so many different kinds of "stock" identities: Howard is an intellectual, Kiki is a black woman in a white intellectual's world, Zora figures herself as spanning the bridge between Levi's urban ghetto identity and her parent's more academic identity, and Jerome is the oddball - he's a womanish kind of intellectual philosopher. And then in the larger group, all of these factors play into characters' identities: race, color, physical build, academic interests, class...it's really fascinating, and I think that Smith is picking up on Forster's dichotomies and expanding them. Sorry this is so half-formed.

Katie Baratz