REVIEW: ZADIE SMITH'S SHORT STORY COLLECTION IS LIT -- IN EVERY SENSE OF THE WORD

There are nineteen short stories in Zadie Smith’s Grand Union, her first collection of short fiction—
some more invigorating than others. All, however, display her shimmering prose, her penchant for
cogent observations, and her fondness for metaphors. They are lit—in every sense of the word—
drunk with spot-on characterization, and, in the new vernacular, exciting narratives set in a variety of
settings. They challenge the reader to pay attention.

Among the group of stories, eleven are new and eight have appeared previously in The New Yorker,
The Paris Review and Granta. The familiar bear re-reading; the new ones offer various voices and
perspectives. The best of them are inviting, effective, and successful.

The brief (four pages) opening story, “The Dialectic,” introduces some of the key themes of those
that follow it. A mother and teenage daughter spending seven days on holiday “on the gritty beach”
in Sopot, Poland, on the Baltic Sea, discuss the subject of “being on good terms with animals” even
as the mother relishes the “thin, barbecued skin” of her chicken wings, the bones of which she
hastens to hide in the sand as if they were “a turd she wished to bury.” While her other fatherless
children—twins and an older brother—cavort unsupervised in the water, the two analyze the truth
about love, guilt, family, and toxic males who, like the inspected little fowl of “chicken sexers” are
swept into “huge grinding vats where they are minced alive.”

The next story, “Sentimental Education,” travels to Cambridge, England, and returns to the
sexcapades of college days of the midlife narrator. Like the Flaubert novel from which it takes its
title, it pays homage to les bon mots while at the same time it is an oxymoron of l’amours
dangereuses. Forty four year-old Monica recalls how her nineteen year-old self “unnerved” men.
She dangled some, subsumed others, destroyed some when she anonymously turned in a student
stowaway. She wants love, in a meritocracy, to be indulged on a “flat playing field.” This effusively
feminist story goes down like a gulp of bracing ice water.

There’s a very different kind of body of water in “Lazy River,” one of the most intriguing stories. It
contains Smith’s best extended metaphors. The river, an artificial current which is a tourist
attraction at an “all inclusive” luxury hotel in southern Spain frequented mostly by Brits, is literal and
figurative. It features a myriad of flotation devices (“rubber rings, tubes, rafts”) in which vacationers
struggle to go against the flow. There are trampolines (for life’s “up-and-down”) and a boardwalk
where natives plait hair for travelers attempting to misappropriate local culture.
The collection moves to New York City for two of the strongest and most compelling stories. “Miss
Adele Amidst the Corsets” and “Escape From New York” are as opposite as stories can be. The first
captures the nature of a fading drag queen; the second imagines a rumor about three well-known
celebrities. Both deal with the nature of loneliness and prejudice that can pervade anyone’s life,
known or unknown.

In the first, forty-six year old Adele busts her bulging foundation garment just as she is about to go
on stage. She confronts racism and homophobia when she has to endure the snide comments from
the owners and other shoppers in the Clinton Corset Emporium, even right wing exhortations
(“RIGHTOUSNESS AND RAGE”) from a talk radio program in the background, at the same time that
her memories recall the shaming she was subjected to by her bigoted family in the “god-forsaken
state of Florida.” She flees the store “only taking what was rightfully hers.”

There is another kind of flight in “Escape From New York.” This story, one of the best of the lot,
speculates about a journey based on a rumor. Allegedly, when all planes were grounded after 9/11,
Michael Jackson rented a Toyota Camry so that he could drive Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando
across country back to Los Angeles. The trio of celebrities only make it to Ohio. On the way, Brando
languishes in the back seat, munching on fast food. Taylor sings along with a CD of Les Miserables
and “dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyy” before the “tigers came.” And Jackson is high on the
“adrenaline of self-survival . . . mixed with pity, mixed with horror.” When they stop at an IHOP and
a beleagured waitress, whose attention is drawn more to the repetitive images on TV of the falling
buildings, doesn’t recognize the celebrities, they realize that no matter their status, they are “stuck”
like everyone else.

Another reconstructed life experience—this time a verifiable one—is imagined in the unsettling
“Kelso Deconstructed.” In shattering prose and graphic blood-curdling imagery, Smith details the
racist real-life murder of the Antiguan immigrant, a carpenter, in England in May of 1959. Kelso and
his fiance, Olivia, are enjoying an idyllic Saturday in Portobello, drifting up to Speakers’ Corner in
Hyde Park, until, coming home from the hospital where he tended to a wounded thumb, he is
stabbed to death.

Several other stories explore a variety of subjects and styles. Some are slighter than others. “The
Canker” and “Meet the President!” are speculative and futuristic. “Parents’ Morning Epiphany,”
“Two Men in a Village,” and “Just Right” lack development and character definition.

But the final story, which carries the title of the collection, “Grand Union,” comes full circle. As
concise as the first (again four pages), it observes another mother and daughter as unattached and
alienated as the duo in the first narrative. One mother, escaping the tantrum of her six-year-old,
conjures up her own dead mother in search of “love, and recognition of history,” following the
“tread of her mudder, and her mudder, moving with necessary speed, not always holding each
other’s hands.”

Grand Union is Smith’s grand gift to readers. What she accomplishes over the range of the nineteen
stories is astonishing. She blinds them with dazzling prose and breaks their hearts with richly
enhanced characters.

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Robert Allen Papinchak, a former university English professor, has reviewed a range of fiction in
newspapers, magazines, journals, and online, including in the New York Times Book Review, the
Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Seattle
Times, USA Today, People, The Writer, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, the New York Journal of
Books, World Literature Today, The Millions, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Strand Magazine,
Mystery Scene Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and others. He has been a judge for Publishers
Weekly’s BookLife Creative Writing Contest and the Nelson Algren Literary Prize for the Short Story.
His own fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and received a STORY award. He is the
author of Sherwood Anderson: A Study of the Short Fiction.