I was given an ARC in exchange for an honest review. “Grand Union” has been my first book by Zadie Smith, so I don’t have anything to compare it to. This book is a collection of short stories about current events: Brexit, addiction, race, LGTB rights…

The topics are original and it is undeniable that she is a very talented writer: her writing is complex and skilled. However, I can’t say I really enjoyed this book. I liked it, I will definitely keep reading more books by Zadie Smith because I really like her style, but these stories were to strange for my taste.

Zadie Smith gives us a wide and disparate collection of short stories, some of which have been published previously. As is often the case with short story collections in my view, it is a mixed bag, some so slight as to be hardly worth bothering with, some rather opaque, others more engaging but too often frustrating as just as you have got into it, it all comes to a much too soon ending. Smith shifts from the past, present and future, encompassing a range of genres, with a variety of settings and styles. When she hits the mark, she writes with acute observational insights and provides a sharp and intelligent social and political commentary on our troubled, complex, and divided world, such as Brexit and Trump. She touches on race, gender, class, immigration, family, relationships, sex, technology and politics. I found this hard to rate, but opted for 4 stars as I reflected on the short stories, judging them to have sufficient remarkable and interesting content to be worth reading. However, I have to say I have a preference for her full length novels. Many thanks to Penguin UK for an ARC.

"Not having any academic background in ‘creative writing’I’ve never really understood the injunction ‘show don’t tell’, but now I think maybe it’s communicating the same basic concept –that there are some ideas impossible to understand or accept as direct statements, but just marginally, fleetingly comprehensible in the form of stories. At times, I do wonder if there’s something slightly dishonest in this approach, that it turns the novel into a kind of parable or illustration of a precept instead of an honest narrative."
From Kelso Deconstructed

In my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2074230313) of Swing Time, the most recent of Zadie Smith’s five novels, all of which I’ve read, I commented that she is an excellent writer and important cultural commentator, but that increasingly her novels don’t seem the best way for me to explore her themes, preferring her essays. I also quoted her as saying in an interview:

"[Musicals] are a mixture of the sublime and the obviously awful — terrible plots, offensive routines. I don't know why I'm attracted to that mix of form. It's obviously much cooler and more sensible to be attracted to perfect form. But something about perfect form repels me. My novels are like that too — I know they should be slim and controlled, but instead they're this ragbag."

I was therefore intrigued with this, her first short story collection how she handled a more slim and controlled (and both words do apply to her stories here) form.

But I do tend to prefer short-stories, if published together in a book, to cohere in some way – repeated characters and motifs are particular favourites (as in another collections I read recently: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2538946196 or even stylistically linked (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2912822774). This felt more like a premature lifetimes greatest hits collection from someone who has only released 8, not entirely successful, singles in the last 5 years, and added another 12 recent songs to make an album.

The stories in the collection are very varied in style – at little too much so: I prefer to get my variety from reading lots of different books – and my reaction varied from enjoyment (although none approached mastery or did anything particularly new or radical) to distaste or incomprehension.

Sentimental Education was perhaps my favourite, in part as I identified with the setting (not named as such but clearly a Cambridge college). Told from the perspective of a student, Monica, it includes another resident of the college, Leon, not a student but rather a friend of one, Monica’s lover, and who has somehow blagged an overnight stay into permanent accommodation, unknown to the college authorities. Annoyed by Leon’s constant presence in her boyfriend’s room and consequent intrusion into their love life Monica hopes the bedders will report him or the other students but everyone else likes him:

"Part of his appeal was that he offered a vision of college life free from the burden of study. All those fantasies from the prospectus, on which the students had been sold – images of young people floating downstream or talking philosophically in high grass – that life had come true only for Leon. From the stained-glass panopticon of the library, Monica would spot him down there, at his liberty: lying on the Backs blowing smoke into the face of a cow, or in a punt with a crowd of freshers and bottle of cava. Meanwhile she wrote and rewrote her thesis on eighteenth-century garden poetry. All Monica’s life was work."

But the story – like a number in the collection – suffers from being gratuitously sexually crude.

Another favourite was Meet the President!, set in a dystopian future – although actually personally as a reader it felt at times utopian. The global citizens of the world/nowhere have rebounded from their Trumpian and Brexit defeats and triumphed.

Young Bill Peek, a true global citizen, tells the hapless locals in a coastal town in Suffolk:

"‘This’– he indicated Felixstowe, from the beach with its turd castings and broken piers, to the empty-shell buildings and useless flood walls, up to the hill where his father hoped to expect him –‘is nowhere. If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. “Capital must flow.'”

Although his interlocutor senses he may not be a local:

‘From round here, are you? Or maybe a Norfolk one? He looks like a Norfolk one, Aggs, wouldn’t you say?’

Although another dystopian saga, The Canker, I found incomprehensible.

Two Men Arrive in a Village is a nicely drawn parable of the inevitable any time a country is invaded or suffers a revolution or civil war, the tone cleverly treading a thin line between satire of cliché, and horror at the endless repetition of looting, murder and rape (usually in that order).

"After eating, and drinking – if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted – the two men will take a walk around, to see what is to be seen . This is the time of stealing. The two men will always steal things, though for some reason they do not like to use this word and, as they reach out for your watch or cigarettes or wallet or phone or daughter, the short one, in particular, will say solemn things like ‘Thank you for your gift’ or ‘We appreciate the sacrifice you are making for the cause’, though this will set the tall one laughing and thus ruin whatever dignified effect the short one was trying to achieve. At some point, as they move from home to home, taking whatever they please, a brave boy will leap out from behind his mother’s skirts and try to overpower the short, sly man."

At the other end of the spectrum, Downtown seemed to be trying too hard to portray an exaggerated New York:

"The New York Public School Calendar does not recognize funks, personal, existential, artistic or otherwise. School starts on September 4th and that’s that. The only way to get out of it is to take an ordinary belt, tie it round your neck, loop it round a door handle and then sit suddenly upon the floor. Although this method likely won’t get your kid out of having to turn up on that first day, it will at least mean you don’t have to take them.

It was September 4th – I had to take them. In the line to get through the school gates – a momentous line, which snakes from Café Loup all the way down Sixth Avenue like a tapeworm of the Devil – a parent started talking to me about his family’s transformative summer break to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. It had taken three planes to get there, they’d gone to bed with monkeys and woken up with sloths and the whole trip had been utterly transformative: transformative to escape the American ‘situation’, transformative for him personally, and for his wife, and for the children, but especially for him. Transformative. I peered at this dude very closely. I hadn’t seen him since last September 4th but to my painterly eye he didn’t appear especially transformed. Seemed like much the same asshole.

On the sad, childless walk home, I heard a very old white lady outside Citarella exclaim loudly, into her phone: ‘But he’s not my friend, he’s my driver!’To which a tall boy in sequinned culottes with a Basquiat ’fro – who happened to be passing – replied: ‘Lady, you are GOALS.’My concern about both jungles and forests is that you can’t really imagine anything like that happening in them."

Kelso Reconstructed is a fictionalised re-telling of the true-life story of the murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill in 1959 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kelso_Cochrane), but overly self-consciously metafictional:

"They are engaged to be married, although they will never marry: by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday 16 May 1959, the last day of Kelso’s life. One thing about the last day of our lives is we almost never know that it is the last day – from here stems ‘dramatic irony’– and no more did Kelso know it. His mind was full of the pain in his thumb and the heat in the room … Kelso, caught in the slipstream of life, without the hindsight of either reader or author, could think only of his own pain."

And also contains what seems to be an odd authorial nod to Sally Rooney when a young Irish nurse called Rooney hands Kelso a prescription that reads:

From: YoungIrishWriter@ gmail.com
To: OlderEnglishWriter@ yahoo.com

Mood simply consists of a seemingly rather random collection of descriptions of moods for example:

"Absurd Modern Mood
‘And the crazy thing is,’ said the Professor of the Philosophy of History to the Professor of the History of Philosophy, ‘how difficult an easy life is! I mean, imagine what a difficult life feels like!’ A nearby graduate, Zenobia, presently assembling a sly dinner out of Philosophy Department canapés – while simultaneously trying to disguise the look of actual hunger in her eyes – took a moment. Suddenly she was overcome by the sense that none of this was real. Not the canapés, not the professors, not the Philosophy Department, nor the whole city campus. (Zenobia has ninety-six thousand dollars in loans. She is studying Philosophy, period.)"

Two stories published in the New Yorker were reviewed and discussed at the time at the Mookse and Gripes website, generally not that favourably.

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2018/07/16/zadie-smith-now-more-than-ever/#comments

http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2017/12/11/zadie-smith-the-lazy-river/#comments

And several stories rather passed me by altogether.

Overall, not a collection that I could particularly recommend. 2.5 stars

I received an advanced reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review

I wish I could have loved it but I just liked it, or really, liked some more than others. She’s a brilliant writer but short stories are not the genre to carry her linguistically complex writing. Solid three.

In her first collection of short stories, Zadie Smith writes with a playfulness. Some of the stories seem like experimental dips into different genres - there is a sci-fi story incorporating VR based in a dystopia wasteland England (‘Meet The President!’, one that resembled an Atwood tale based in a indeterminate Nordic island structured around period cycles (‘The Canker’), one very post-modern ‘Narrative Techniques’ worksheet (‘Parent’s Morning Epiphany’). Most of these stories concern the power of words and the problems of race (‘Kelso Deconstructed’ about the racially-motivated murder of Kelso Cochrane, an Antiguan immigration in London) and gender (‘Two Men Arrive in a Village’ about the brutality of men, consistent through time and place); it is funny (‘The thing about undergarments,’ Dee said, ‘is they can only do so much with the cards they’ve been dealt? Like Obama.’) and sharp (‘No one ever got lynched and thought, Well, at least this will lead inexorably to the civil rights movement. They just shook, suffered, screamed, and died. Pain is the least symbolic thing there is.’) Yet for all the cleverness in this writing, it is not always enjoyable - few of the characters linger or shine with any of the brightness of Smith’s novels.

Zadie Smith is an excellent writer and in these short stories she produces a commentary on our times, for example post Brexit holidaying in Spain, aspects of race and race relations or contemporary sexual encounters.
There are some intriguing characters and some stories left me wanting to hear a lot more about these people, which, whilst slightly frustrating, is a mark of Smith’s skill as a writer. There are some post modern elements which are more challenging but add to the overall feeling this collection leaves me with - of having engaged with a fine mind and stories that illuminate and engage with complex contemporary issues.

Grand Union is a collection of short stories from Zadie Smith, looking at some very modern preoccupations and crises as well as some glimpses of the future and past. Characters reflect on love and family, thoughts during a package holiday are unveiled, and a privileged teenager tries out augmented reality technology, in just some of the stories in the book.

The stories cover a wide range of topics and settings and many are particularly short, which makes it an easy book to read, moving quickly on from each tale. This does mean that at times it feels like a slight dip into a world, without a sense of ending, and it is a shame to leave some of the memorable characters behind to move onto the next story. It is these sharply depicted characters that may be the best part of the collection, people formed in short spaces and varying writing techniques. Smith also plays around with narrative and perspective in ways which create clever, postmodern stories, though some people may not like their ambiguity.

Grand Union is a book that covers a lot of ground and has an impressive range of genres, settings, and styles, considering modern issues as well as some timeless ones. It is a modern and quickly paced short story collection, but this means that sometimes it feels like it doesn't quite leave a mark, choosing stylistic cleverness and ambiguity over narrative satisfaction.

Zadie Smith's Grand Union is a collection of short stories with varied themes. I wished some of them were longer so I could stay with the characters.