Zadie Smith Polishes the Art of the Short Story in ‘Grand Union’

Lacking the core advantage of a continuous plot, anthologies of short stories can feel like an overwhelming whirlwind of incongruous tales, jumping from story to story within a matter of mere pages. It’s one thing to slowly digest the stories filed under the New Yorker’s “Flash Fiction” section, yet another to keep up with the racing, mental vertigo-inducing shifts of setting, character, and conflict in an anthology.

“Grand Union,” Zadie Smith’s latest release, manages to mitigate this caveat with ease. Although not avoiding it altogether, this diverse collection of stories written in dazzling, pitch-perfect prose contains a central thread: personal tragedies. To create these sensitive, cutting stories, Smith uses poignant and heartbreakingly accurate descriptions, oftentimes at the expense of sufficiently comprehensive plots. At times, this works in her favor, but other times it doesn’t — luckily the versatility of a collection allows for both successes and failures.

In the outstanding “The Lazy River,” the stream-of-consciousness narrations are captivating and full of Smith’s proclivity for the colorful and oddly specific. They follow the structure of an inner monologue, one that ends almost as soon as it begins, and lack entirely conclusive endings due to their stream-of-consciousness nature. “The Lazy River” is an intentionally vague commentary of the 21st century mores that have held us hostage in subliminal ways. The story itself is self-aware of the lazy river as a metaphor for numbly drifting with the current of society, which prevents it from becoming another trite, reflexive rejection of questionable societal paradigms. To create this self-aware story, Smith interweaves specific yet minute details of reality with the metaphor itself: “Even if you don’t move you will get somewhere and then return to wherever you started, and if we may speak of the depth of a metaphor, well, then, it is about three feet deep, excepting a brief stretch at which point it rises to six feet four.”

The technique falls flat in other stories, such as “Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets,” that have a narrative with more concrete characters and settings. It’s not that these stories lack Smith’s signature eloquent prose, and it’s not difficult to grasp the complex, raw emotions that the characters feel. But when the bulk of the story is dedicated to these poetic descriptions, it is hard to be reeled into the story itself. The painstakingly detailed interactions between the characters seem unnecessary and futile when placed inside the slow-moving plots that never quite reach the zenith of their potential.

However, Smith is able to find an optimal balance between the plot and the elaborate descriptions in other stories. “Big Week,” a story that uncovers the causes of a long-married couple’s separation, achieves this. The development in this story is clever, as it switches from the husband’s perspective and ends on the wife’s perspective: “Time began to cautiously reshape itself around her broken body, and she found she wanted to be alone with it once more.” This abrupt switch of perspective reframes the story not as a relationship destroyed by some external force, but rather as a woman’s search for fulfillment — something that a man ultimately could not and is in no place to control.

These stories aren’t entirely a form of literary escapism. In the moments that they appear to be so, they will awaken the reader out of a state of reverie with subtle social commentaries. Smith doesn’t force these down the reader’s throat, but deftly weaves them in, perhaps like chocolate cake discreetly flecked with shreds of zucchini. She explores “wokeness” and how fragile and self-interested the foundations of one’s wokeness can be in “Just Right.” In “Downtown,” Smith briefly refers to the Kavanaugh hearings with apt frustration, seeming to make a statement about a woman’s right and need to take up space.

Will the short story ever be perfected? Perhaps we can unfix our gaze on the standard, archetypal figures whose works have been beaten to death in our 10th grade English classes and instead direct our attention towards Smith, who has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to capture the hardening struggles of life alongside the bursting epiphanies — the complete, tragic range of the human experience, in economical bundles that when combined, do in fact coalesce to form — get this — a grand union.

—Staff writer Jessica Dong can be reached at jessica.dong@thecrimson.com.