What type of character is Howard Belsey, and what leads to his fall in On Beauty by the Zadie Smith?

Integral to the character of Howard Belsey and to his fall
from grace is his self-belief that he is as passé as his projector. From this, you might
say that Howard is the Failure type of character. He
compares himself to and equates himself with outmoded forms of technology, even while
Smith J. Miller offers, in his Northern England slur, to teach him the latest
technology, "pah-point. Ah could show you." The narrator uses third person point-of-view
to describe Howard's comparison of himself to passé
technology:

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The projector was grey and orange--the colours of
the future thirty years ago--and, like all obsolete technology, elicited an involuntary
sympathy from Howard. He was not modern any more
either.

Howard's fall
depended upon his jealousy of Monty Kipps and his own inability to achieve his
expectations for his academic career: the more an academic publishes, the greater their
career opportunities. Since Howard felt like obsolete technology; since students
"shopped" and dropped his class; since Kipps published on Rembrandt first; since Howard
told himself, with a shake of his head, that he "was beyond the point of learning new
tricks," Howard pushed himself in despairing depression to initiate his own fall by
engaging in extramarital affairs with Claire and with Victoria.