A not-so-grand union

Zadie Smith, experimenting as always, comes up with a multiplicity of genres: autofiction, dystopia, sci-fi, social satire and parable. Yet, one is left wanting, feels Madhavi S Mahadevan

Twenty years ago, when Zadie Smith, aged 24, published her debut novel White Teeth, she was hailed as a literary wunderkind. Acclaimed for its fresh, witty writing, multicultural cast of characters and richness of themes — influence of history, race and identity, class structure, tradition, science, religion — the novel won several prestigious awards and was included in Time magazine’s list of 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923-2005.

Since then, four other novels, a novella and two collections of essays have established Smith as one of the most exciting contemporary writers. ‘Grand Union’ is her first collection of short stories. Nineteen in all, eight published earlier, mostly in the New Yorker, and eleven that are fresh. Bearing all the hallmarks of her style — vigour, pace, humour, sharp observation, intelligent social commentary — it is, however, like the curate’s egg, ‘good in parts.’

Smith, experimenting as always, comes up with a multiplicity of genres — auto-fiction, dystopia, sci-fi, social satire, parable. The opening story, ‘The Dialectic’, about a broken family, takes us into the mind of a single mother on a holiday with her four children at a seaside resort where ‘the best thing about a resort town such as this was that you did what everybody else did without thinking, moving like a pack. For a fatherless family, as theirs was now, this collective aspect was the perfect camouflage. There were no individual people. In town, the woman was on the contrary, an individual, a particularly unfortunate sort of individual, saddled with four fatherless children. Here she was only another mother buying candyfloss for her family.’

Middling fare

Through a series of images beginning with a ‘a half-eaten chicken wing,’ and ending with an assembly line of ‘the little chicks, hundreds of thousands of them’ and ‘the chicken sexers’ who ‘sweep all the males into huge grinding vats’, it ruminates on the reality of immigration.

A Spanish vacation is the setting for ‘The Lazy River’, a story that is more a metaphor for everything in modern life — from political and environmental collapse to social media — while offering a sly commentary on Brexiteers ‘who cannot be sure if we will need a complicated visa to enter the Lazy River come next summer. This is something we will worry about next summer.’

Zeitgeist is reflected in ‘The Canker’, which is about being a storyteller in the time of Trump, known here as the Usurper. ‘His mind was exactly as everyone had expected it, it writhed and it oozed. It was an abomination.’

Some of the stories read like literary thumbnail sketches — ideas that need fleshing out, not half-bad lines apropos nothing in particular. In this category fall ‘Moods’, ‘For The King’ and ‘Blocked’. The last is in the voice of a writer — as God perhaps? — meditating on her early or pioneering work, created with ‘this sense of unlimited potential. You think you contain multitudes, and in my experience you kind of do, because you’re still sufficiently flexible to contain multitudes, you haven’t drawn lines around your shit yet and there is still something ineffable about you, something that can make space for whatever is not you.’

Meditations such as these become tedious. Closer to the short story form is ‘Sentimental Education’ told from the third person perspective of a mother in midlife who reflects on her student days, as a feminist in a time of sexual experimentation, and her relationship with a student, a fellow black, who’d brought along a secret roommate to university. Similarly, ‘Big Week’, about a failed marriage, is a tale well told. However, random scattered gems do not make a great collection. One hopes for a better fare next time. A novel would be very welcome.