In “Grand Union,” esteemed British writer Zadie Smith amusingly draws readers into the manifestations of her musings on the human condition in her first collection of short stories. Smith’s tact with fiction is evident throughout the collection, just in case her earlier works, including bestsellers “White Teeth” and “Swing Time,” weren’t convincing enough.
In “Grand Union,” she paints complex pictures of regular people. At first glance, they seem straightforward, but as the portrayals develop, the intricacy of even the most regular-seeming people becomes clear. Some of these most striking portrayals revolve around the relationships parents have with their children — they simultaneously amuse and stimulate.
In some of the first stories of the collection, Smith’s youngest characters are the most entertaining. In the opening, “The Dialectic,” the young, nameless daughter is critical of her mother. The first story opens with the line, “‘I would like to be on good terms with all animals,’ remarked the woman, to her daughter,” as she lounges on the beach, pregnant with her fourth child. But her daughter is having none of this act — as her mother is eating a chicken wing during this exchange. The mother continues, “‘I did not say that I am. I said that I should like to be.’ The daughter let out a cruel laugh. ‘Words are cheap,’ she said.” Right from the first page, on which this dialogue transpires, the characters in “Grand Union” are reminding each other of the harsh realities of their worlds, while these same worlds are simultaneously humorous and reassuringly lighthearted.
In the following story, “Sentimental Education,” this divide between childhood and adulthood is bridged skillfully by a few lines in which it is revealed that, “In all the many stories she’d told herself about herself since childhood, the narrative that had never appeared, not in any form, was the one where she had the power to hurt anybody in any way.” Smith addresses both the young and the old — the readily critical daughter and the weary mother of four eating the chicken wing — in one fell swoop.
She connects the characters even as they exist across a generational divide, the nameless woman had never seen herself as harmful, which works to absolve the harsh daughter in the previous story of any blame. As for the mother, she also seems to connect to the nameless woman in “Sentimental Education;” how could she be harming an animal? She never could have imagined it. Smith forms connections among the characters of “Grand Union,” regardless of the boundaries of each sovereign story.
The story “Downtown,” written in the first person, begins with an esteemed Austrian painter visiting the narrator’s apartment with his exemplary daughters: “They wore the kind of clothes you can’t buy in the shop, you have to get them delivered direct from the turn of the century. Fucking angels, both of them.” The narrator proceeds, “Meanwhile my kids raged around the place, dressed as long-distance truckers, hyped-up on sour gummies. They clung to their tablets as if to items necessary for their very survival – colostomy bags, say.” Smith is able to encapsulate the idea of insecurity in the most comical way. Why are the narrator’s children dressed like long-distance truckers? Unclear. Why do they cling to their tablets? Children cling to their tablets because it is 2019. Smith is able to tangle the timelessness of insecurity with the strikingly timely reality of kids clinging to their tablets.
The differences that separate parents from their children are not necessarily humorous in nature, but Smith allows them to be. She crafts them in a way that makes them effortlessly so. It would almost feel silly to take life seriously after finishing “Grand Union,” because, in the universe the collection creates, the complexities of life are nothing more difficult than humorous anecdotes, stories to tell at a dinner party yet to come.
