Claire's view of the affair with Howard: she considers herself a masochist, trying to wreck the greatest love she's ever had, Warren. She was the one who instigated the affair. "Why should everyone be mad at me? I'm the victim." Claire is selfish and wanted to ruin one of the greatest marriage on campus - she succeeded in that Howard is now questioning what he is and his marriage.
Romantic poetry, anything about beauty or idealization, is politically suspect. Reification, to turn something back into an object; relationships are not objects and therefore not beautiful. By the end of the novel, beauty has been de-objectified and made relationships beautiful again. Zadie Smith shows her hatred in the objectification of women - Claire is thin, Kiki is fat and that's why Howard sleeps with Claire - but she's also upset that she can't write about or appreciate beauty. Beautifying landscape is wrong because there are laborers working and dying in it and beautifying it is hiding the politics of it. But sometimes it's not about that! Landscape can be beautiful and it has nothing to do with politics! Why can't people just accept that some things are as they appear, that there is no underlying idea or message, that something can be as it is and nothing else. Why do things all have to be politicized?
Carl wanted to come to the university, to get a ticket to the future but he realized that for all their intelligence, they can't see the truth about their own lives. He knows that Howard slept with a student (Victoria, who also slept with Jerome), that Monty Kipps has slept with an intern and is trying to get the non-paying students kicked out to save his career. "You got your college degrees but you don't even live right!"
Zadie Smith is trying to tell her readers that we need morality, be it Christian or otherwise, but we need some guidelines, something that keeps us on the straight and narrow, or something that defines our lives for the better. Nobody in the novel has morals or if they do, they don't have the backbone to follow their morals. Not Howard, not Monty, not Kiki, not any of them.
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