zadie smith's collection 'grand union' feels less like a collection of short stores and more like a series of story fragments put into one book. smith is a very talented writer, and has a way of crafting sentences that illustrate how obviously intelligent she is. but in the case of this book, i don't think that intelligence translated into compelling fiction. there lacked a common thread from story to story, and i felt like i was grasping at air for something to anchor myself in. i'm not turned off of her writing altogether (i LOVED 'intimations'), but her short stories are not for me.

This was an average collection of short stories. While Zadie Smith is a great writer, the collection felt a little disjointed and unevenly matched! Will still be looking forward to future writings from her!

I love Zadie Smith’s writing, so when I saw Grand Union on Net Galley, I put in a wish for a copy. I didn’t hold out much hope, so I was thrilled when I got an email a couple of weeks ago saying that Penguin Random House Canada had approved my request. Having just finished the book, I’m now struggling a bit to rate it.

In “Kelso Deconstructed”, the eponymous character struggles to read a story, noting that “he was not really following it, but still he liked it well enough for those sentences that seemed, every now and then, to be about himself”. Ultimately, I think these lines encapsulate my struggle to rate this book. On the one hand, I loved some of the stories and insights in this text. My favourite story, “Parents‘ Morning Epiphany” turns a child’s “Narrative Techniques Worksheet” into a mediation on life and writing that I probably enjoyed as much as I did because I’m an English teacher who makes these kinds of worksheets. There were other moments of connection like this, and I would argue that Smith’s insights into middle age are some of the more profound that I have read. On the other hand, many of the stories had an obliqueness that made the collection feel like a bit of a slog at times. Admittedly, I felt somewhat rushed trying to get this book read and may not have had time to savor it the way it should be, but many of the stories felt more like coy vignettes than stories, so the book often lacked momentum for me as a reader.

Overall, fans of Zadie Smith will find many of the things that make her writing brilliant. The stories are typically incisive takes on issues of identity and race. I noticed too that there are explorations of power, meditations on middle age, and questions about the purpose and importance of writing. Smith’s handling of these themes is timely, and the book offers relevant commentary on the current world, which makes Grand Union a worthwhile read. Still, the writing here seems widely varied to me, and I found some of the stories to be excellent, while I did not enjoy others as much. Therefore, as a collection, I’m going to give this a 3.

Thank you to @netgalley and @penguinrandomca for this ARC in exchange for an honest review. Grand Union is scheduled for release on October 8.

“Plot is not my strong point.” — Zadie Smith

I have to admit that I have some jealousy for Zadie Smith. She wrote her first novel, White Teeth, while she was still in her teens if memory serves correct. (Wikipedia was of little help to clarify this point.) So my jealousy is two-fold: one, the book went on to win some awards, which invokes my jealousy for being such a finely written book. Two, it has been said that, in publication circles, being the age of 35 and publishing your first novel at that age makes you practically an infant in publishing years, which again invokes my jealousy in Zadie Smith for being published so young, practically a zygote. Now that Zadie Smith is almost 44 years old — she was born just scant weeks after me — I wanted to check in and see if she’s still turning in fantastic books. With her short story collection, Grand Union, the answer is, alas, no.

Perhaps the short story format eludes her, but the vast majority of the stories in this collection go nowhere fast — they are academically-toned for the sole purpose of being studied in universities, and are experimental for the sake of being experimental. That’s not to say that I’m dissatisfied or unhappy that a book such as Grand Union exists. Zadie Smith is a woman of colour, and we desperately need intelligent, highly rendered books written by women of colour like you wouldn’t believe. However, Smith falls into the same traps as fellow woman of colour author Dionne Brand in her latest book, Theory. Smith, like Brand, writes high above the heads of the hoi polloi and, in the former’s case, infuses her stories with philosophical digressions that quickly go … well, you know where and how quickly.

And that’s when Smith isn’t entirely guh-rossing you out. In her story “Sentimental Education,” which is one of the pieces that open the collection, there’s a scene with a black man wiping his penis off with shit after having anal sex with his girlfriend. Ew! I suppose there’s a subtext because Smith loves subtexts, and I suppose this has to do with the character wanting to be white or something. I don’t know. I was too busy trying not to throw up in my mouth. Later on, in the same story, one character uses her teeth to dislodge a tampon embedded in another female character. Double ew! I’m not sure what the point of that was, aside from the fact to make the story a little more Low Art than the High Lit it aspires to also be.

That’s not to say that there are decent stories in this collection when Smith stops trying to be so pretentious. The collection’s centerpiece, “Big Week,” is a compelling story about a Boston man trying to get his life back together after it has hit rock bottom due to substance abuse issues. However, it simply just runs out of gas and … ends. It is as though Smith were trying to write a novel and quickly got bored and simply abandoned the piece, which is a shame as it is the best story in the collection by far, and caught my interest in the same way that White Teeth did. A story that follows, “Meet the President!,” is also interesting as it is set in an augmented reality with a teenager playing a first-person shooter while he’s been led along to someone’s funeral. However, stories such as these are too far too few. Instead, we get faceless stories that are about a whole pile of nothing. One of the stories, features a drag queen but doesn’t reveal that he’s a drag queen until halfway into the story! What a cheat!

Overall, I’m not very impressed with this story collection. Again, it serves to illustrate that perhaps Zadie Smith is better at the longer form of the novel — though my only experience with Smith’s novel work is, again, with White Teeth. I’m also not sure what the need is for a physical collection of short stories, as it appears that quite a few of them are available online at the websites of the publications that originally published them. In short, Grand Union is simply shelf filler. Buy it to show all of your friends that you’ve read a Very Important Author if you must, but don’t actually read it. The time spent reading it will be wasted minutes, outside of the handful of stories that I mentioned that are somewhat passable at least.

Zadie Smith may no longer be the twenty-something wunderkind that she once was if this collection is any indication. Something has happened to her writing. While she’s pushing herself in novel and not-so-obvious ways, the end result is not very readable. If you’re looking for a book to entertain you, Grand Union is not that kind of book. It strives to be thoughtful and say Big Things about the state of humanity, but trips itself up by not having much of a linear plot to follow in most of these pieces, save for “Big Week” and “Meet the President!” Zadie Smith writes best when she plainly has a plot in sight and has something to say with the confines of that. Take that away and all you’re left with is bafflegab. Alas, Grand Union has too much of this. For instance, there’s a story about 9/11 called “Escape from New York” that serves no purpose than to get its characters out of the city to safety. The End. No point, no moral. If anything, Grand Union will serve to remind you just how good White Teeth was. If that’s the case, then re-read White Teeth again and take a pass on this. Grand Union is below middling at best, and a surprise to someone who once thought that a young Zadie Smith could once take on the world, which, through her writing, Smith seems no more capable of doing.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫
In Zadie Smith’s collection of short stories there is a wide variety of styles and structure. While there were a few that missed the mark for me, maybe because the style was too risky or the message not totally clear to me, most were thought-provoking, clever and always managed to bring about a discomfort that I enjoy in non-conventional fiction. The topics of race, sex, and identity are topics Smith clearly understands and puts forth in fresh ways to the reader.

A genuinely strange collection of stories. At the core are several stories which seem like essays, or diary entries from the author. They feature the author herself, with obvious references to her actual life, written in a plain style that's completely at odds with Zadie Smith's reputation but still incredibly potent. Blocked, for example, is so clearly about White Teeth and the aftermath during which, as Smith has said herself, she suffered writer's block, that one almost wonders why it's billed as a short story at all. But then another story in the middle, Downtown, offers the key. It's yet another story that features the author and several references to her life (albeit more disguised this time, even if thinly) but the first page centres on another artist (or author) who's done something unusual with his own series of works (books) that has people torn, questioning whether he's elevated the form and breathed new life into it, or ruined it completely, or if his work even qualifies as part of the art form, to begin with. It's meta, of course, not just because it directly speaks to what the author herself is doing in this collection, but it also directly references another author, Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose books which did the same thing, and spurred similar conversation, Smith has said she needs "like crack".

About half of the stories won't be for everyone, but there are many other more "straightforward" and "traditional" stories to satisfy readers. Overall, it affirms why Zadie Smith is one of our greatest living artists. She isn't content to coast. Her obsession with constantly exploring new ways of thinking and mapping new patterns of creativity is a gift to contemporary literature.

I received a copy of this short story collection from the publisher via NetGalley.

My reading of Zadie Smith's work seems to fall into two categories: really loved ("White Teeth", "Swing Time") and can't get into at all ("The Autograph Man" and, unfortunately, this short story selection). I struggled with the shifts in perspective within individual stories and found myself mildly repelled, rather than drawn in, by most of those I attempted.

Not for me.