Review:
Grand Union: Stories by Zadie Smith
New York: Penguin Press, 2019, 242 pp.
This volume has been bracing to my spirit. Smith gleefully breaks all those rules of story writing I hear so often that it stirs me to rebellion. Show don’t tell? Smith raises the question of whether description should “only concern itself with the visual” to “reinscribe the real.” Point of view shift without signalling? Done to devastating effect in “Big Week.” Long sentences extended with multiple clauses? Offered as a rich, rare gift and privilege in “For the King.” And she sends up all the sacred cows with a “Narrative Techniques Worksheet” in “Parents’ Morning Epiphany.”
Smith dares to question everything. She refuses to either condemn or idealize alternate sexual choices and adopted variations of gender. She refuses to relegate sexism to men. Her probing extends to expressions of outrage against our current Presidential “Usurper.” The “adversary” who “shall-not-be-named” is presented in various disguises, most blatantly in “Now More Than Ever” and “The Canker.” Without granting false moral equivalency, Smith explores the effects of being so rudely shoved into opposition mode and held hostage there with no relief as fresh ethical assaults pile on too fast for any subtle response.
The author’s gentle ridicule of contrarian views and subtle language is presented with obvious devotion to elegant thought and word structures. As the stories conspire to show how actions IRL (in real life) disable philosophy and blunt expression, their execution preserves the exquisite complex forms and reminds us of what waits for time to contemplate.
Sometimes survival depends on swift, collective action, even with mixed motives and without full understanding. To drive home the point at the end, the narrator of “Grand Union” pictures “bold girls” escaping the shadow of the grandfather, his power and possessions, “moving with necessary speed, not always holding each other’s hands.”
