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Grand Union

By Zadie Smith

Penguin Press, 246 pp.

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.

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.