Short stories - 5 in New Yorker, 2 in Paris Review and 1 from Granta. The rest unpublished.
- Dialectic - A fatherless family is on holiday. A daughter who's not yet a woman says "I dislike this place. It makes no sense to build a resort town around such a filthy and unwelcoming sea". At the end I think it's the mother who imagines millions of male chicks being killed on an assembly line. The husband had left to work on a car assembly line.
- Sentimental Eduction - Far better. "In a matriarchy, you'd hear women boasting to their mates: "I subsumed him in my anus. I really made his penis disappear. I just stole it away and hid it deep inside myself until he didn't even exist." said Monica to student boyfriend Darryl, whose non-student mate and drug-dealer Leon sleeps on his floor. At the end, a flash-forward - "Could it be? Had she really slept with three people in twelve hours? The things we put young bodies through? And because you can't remember forward, she would have to wait a long. long time to find a faint future echo of this extremity: breastfeeding one child, then a few hours later, lying next to another till it slept; then waking in a third room - all of this within one night - and pressing backwards into the beloved, to nullify his flesh in hers and vice versa". Pretty good.
- The Lazy River - An all-in hotel's water course with a flow is explicitly used by a mother as an analogy for life - "they will climb back into the metaphor with the rest, back into this watery Ouroboros, which, unlike the river of Heraclitus, is always the same no matter where you happen to step in". She thinks that "southern Spain has the highest ratio of metaphor to reality of any place I've ever known". At the end she sits on the balcony catching up with social media. She sees others doing the same. She watches a man in the water "clean whatever scum we have left of ourselves off of the sides". I'd have liked to have known more about her family life - her husband and little kids are with her.
- Words and Music - Wendy, a old woman (70 plus, twice married), moves into a house left by her mad sister. She finds the postcard and photos she'd sent. She sees some (mad? homeless?) people regularly on the streets.
- Just Right - Donovan, 8, with a slight speech impediment and arty parents, is paired up to do a classroom show-and-tell with Cassie. They end up talking about the Guggenheim, which is being built. They kiss and explore bodies. She attends his family puppet show. Her mother advises him not to get involved with her - not because he's white and she's black, but because she lacks imagination. Interesting details. Too minor a story.
- Parents' Morning Epiphany - A dud. Not even good of its type.
- Downtown - A mother/painter experiences life in NY. "My son asked me if the young man was 'sick in the head' which is our downtown euphemism for batshit crazy, but my daughter who is very, very savvy said 'No way - look at his clothes!' "
- Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets - Miss Adele is 46. "Whenever her disappointing twin brother, Devin, deigned to call her from his three-kids-and-a-labradoodle, don't-panic-it's-organic, liberal-negro-wet-dream-of-a-Marin-Country fantasy existence, Miss Adele made a point of gathering up all her hard-won opinions and giving them to him good". But the main part of the piece concerns her dissatisfaction with the service in a corset shop - the loud radio and the argument between the staff. I don't get why Devin's mentioned.
- Mood - It may be excellent. I don't get it.
- Escape from New York - Michael tries to get his friends fat Marlon and bejeweled Elizabeth out of New York. They can't fly because of ash, so he hires a cheap car. Only by reading other reviews did I learn that the characters are Jackson, Brando, and Taylor. Still not much of a story.
- Big Week - We see McRae in various situations, talking. He has 3 grown sons and is about to move out - an amicable separation. The dialogs are lively
'So, he's gone to see some kind of a rapper - I'm blanking on his name. Real famous, this guy.'
Urvashi threw out the names she knew, doing her best to describe each man physically. For a while it seemed like she would be doing this for the rest of her life.
'You know what? Now I think about it, I believe this person was a white gentleman.'
And in this far smaller pond, it proved to be the second fish. - Meet the President! - SF, set in East Anglia. Lowestoft has a population of 850 - the only people left are those who can't leave. Bill Peek, 14, is augmented. He talks with a local. I think he's playing an immersive computer game while guiding the local to her sister's wake.
- Two Men Arrive in a Village - "Sometimes on horseback, sometimes by foot, in a car or astride motorbikes, occasionally in a tank [...] Sunset has, historically, been a good time for the two men, wherever they have arrived" the style switches between general and particular. I've done this sort of thing, so it's not at all a new idea. Is it well done? Well enough.
- Kelso Deconstructed - Unbeknown to him, it's Kelso's last day of life. He's hurt his thumb. He and his girlfriend pop to Speaker's Corner - "a newspaper boy was changing the hoarding poster from today's headline: 'SIGNS AND SYMBOLS!' to tomorrow's: 'FORESHADOWING!'". He goes late to hospital and is given a prescription which is a print-out of an e-mail post about "show and tell". On the way home he's knifed and dies. We're shown the muderer's witness statement formatted as a poem. A marxist comes to the funeral. The ending is "I am curious about the young Marxist, and stop to take a copy of his paper when he hands it to me, and stand for a moment in the street, admiring the brazen headline: ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT." .
- Blocked - About depression, writers block and getting a dog. Would have been better as a straight essay.
- The Canker - Ursula Le Guin. Featuring, as several of these pieces do, a storyteller
- For the king - Reported speech. 2 middle-aged intellectuals chatting about intellectuals, how things have changed, gay society, sex clubs, daytime sex, etc. "we could watch several pairs of picturesque lovers go by, two bodies on a single scooter, helmetless, holding each other, as they had previously done on Vespas and on bikes, in 2CVs and horse-drawn carriages, or on the back of a farmer's trailer, snug upon bales of hay"
- Now more than ever - more pensees disguised as reported speech
- Grand Union - A mother angry with her 6 year-old goes out to talk with her dead mother. 3 pages.
Other reviews
- Kate Clanchy (There is autofiction, speculative fiction (including an enterprising riff on the urban myth that Michael Jackson took Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando out of town to escape 9/11), and some mixtures of speculative fiction and parable. There is one full-blown and terrifying Brechtian parable in “Two Men Arrive in a Village”, and an abundance of metafictions scratching away at the elements of narrative, some of which, such as the irritable and meandering “Parents’ Morning Epiphany”, feel a little underpowered. [...] The story “Blocked”, though, challenges us to cavil against this restless experimentation [...] Best of all, and pointing surely to Smith’s future, is “For the King”, a piece in the autobiographical manner of Karl Ove Knausgaard)
- Johanna Thomas-Corr (The writing in Grand Union is most alive when Smith is channelling versions of herself, that is, the storyteller (The Canker; Blocked), the teacher (Now More Than Ever), the mother (The Lazy River) or the bookish swot (Kelso Deconstructed). We find a combination of the last two in her best story, Sentimental Education [...] At least eight of the 19 stories in Grand Union aren’t very good. Two dystopian efforts, Meet the President! (a post-apocalyptic ramble about a child’s virtual reality game) and Escape from New York (inspired by the urban myth that Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando fled the city together after 9/11), are cute ideas but on the page, both dawdle along. Her more conventional, naturalistic pieces, such as Big Week and Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets, are mannered and self-conscious)
- Heller McAlpin (you could say it feels like an uneven grab bag of picked-up pieces and experiments — some of which, from an unknown or less-celebrated writer, might have stayed in a drawer. [...] Some of the slighter stories in Grand Union — "Blocked," "Mood," "The Dialectic" "Parents' Morning Epiphany" — feel not so much like footnotes as literary doodles, possible material for a future novel. But there are also reminders of what Smith is capable of at her best, and many of them involve characters trying to make sense of our times and the march of time in general as they advance beyond their youth)
- Stuart Kelly (a wonderful piece, “The Lazy River”, about tourists, swimming pools, apathy and Brexit, that could have been by John Cheever [...] What binds this book? One feature which seems to me rather conspicuous is the regret, the melancholy in many of the pieces. [] The other noticeable thing is the number of religious references.)
- Ross Jeffery (you’d think that this collection would be a banger of a book, but for me, unfortunately, it felt more like a wet squib – and needless to say I was hugely disappointed. [...] The story, which I found to be the standout in the collection and which I feel made this journey into Zadie Smith’s collection worthwhile after my initial disappointment was ‘Big Week‘.)
- B.H.Lake (The stories of Grand Union are both new stories as well as previously published, are tied together by two shared threads: the problem of pain, and the knowledge that outside artificiality is the reminder of death [...] The protagonists of each story in Grand Union find themselves in struggles from which there are no escape. Each is forced to confront their pain and, as a result, discover who they really are. [...] “Escape From New York” [] is magnificently written and unexpectedly heartbreaking—it mourns what might have been while remaining rooted in acceptance of the present moment.)
- Sam Webb (‘The Lazy River’, ‘Words and Music’, ‘Parents’ Morning Epiphany’ and ‘Mood’ are more like story-essays than traditional shorts. [...] As a self-confessed Smith-o-phile, it pains me to say that Grand Union lacks this imaginative freedom. The writer is fettered by the form—she approaches tough and pertinent subjects, yes, but everything is all too quickly wrapped up within a couple of pages.)
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