Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* In cunning and mordant short stories, collected here for the first time, Smith, an empathic and sardonic global writer, inhabits the psyches of radically different characters in varied settings as she orchestrates stealthily cutting dramas of generational and societal power struggles complicated by gender and race. Brexit-era Brits float in an artificial circular waterway at a Spanish resort in "The Lazy River," fully aware that they are drifting in a metaphor. In the sexually scorching "Sentimental Education," a mother lounging in a London park reflects on her aggressive relationship with a college boyfriend when they were two of four black students at their school. Adept at sudden psychological pivots, Smith portrays sparring mothers and daughters, a disgraced cop, and a hilarious yet traumatized transgender woman of color, and brings together two eight-year-olds: Donovan, a white boy whose parents run a "raggedy" Greenwich Village puppet theater in the late 1950s, and Cassie, a Black chess prodigy. Other stories trace the Caribbean diaspora, critique the corrosive theater of social media, and envision the privileged dwelling in virtual realities on a ravaged Earth. Fury, heartbreak, and drollery collide in masterfully crafted prose that ranges in effect from the exquisitely tragic lyricism of Katherine Mansfield to the precisely calibrated acid bath of Jamaica Kincaid as Smith demonstrates her unique prowess for elegant disquiet. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Grand Union
Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Marlon Brando are driving out of Manhattan after a terrorist attack. What sounds like the opening of an urban myth is actually the zany plotline of "Escape from New York," one of 19 tales in Zadie Smith's first collection of short stories, Grand Union. These masterful tales impress, engage and occasionally infuriate as Smith brings her dazzling wit and acute sensitivity to bear. These stories are ready to grapple with the complex times we live in.
If anything serves this collection best, it's the humor that runs through the stories like a lazy river. All genres are Smith's to play with, from fables to science fiction to a realistic conversation between two friends. Even the few weaker efforts still brim with ideas and intelligence. No subjects are off-limits, from an older trans woman shopping for shapewear in "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" to a young mother remembering her sexual escapades in college in "Sentimental Education." Smith uses the third-person plural to fine effect in one of the collection's best, the parable "Two Men Arrive in a Village," which explores global politics without ever mentioning a politician or country by name.
Smith has explored the complexities of families and friendships in an urban setting over the course of five award-winning novels. Those themes are reflected in the delightful "Words and Music," in which the surviving sister of an elderly pair of siblings sits in a Harlem apartment, reminiscing about the music that shaped her life, and in "For the King," in which two old friends catch up over a decadent Parisian meal. Grand Union is bookended by two stories of mothers and daughters—one a vignette, the other a ghost story, both with a depth that far outweighs their brevity, something that can be truthfully said for each of these stories.
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
Nineteen erudite stories wheel through a constellation of topics, tones, and fonts to dizzying literary effect. After launching a quiver of short fiction in the New Yorker, Granta, and the Paris Review, Smith adds 11 new pieces to publish her first collection. A reader can enter anywhere, as with Smith's bravura "The Lazy River," which "unlike the river of Heraclitus, is always the same no matter where you happen to step into it." The artificial aquatic amusement, rotating endlessly through a Spanish resort, is "a non-judgement zone" for tourists where "we're submerged, all of us." Wit marbles Smith's fiction, especially the jaunty "Escape From New York," which riffs on the urban legend that Michael Jackson—"people had always overjudged and misunderestimated him"—ferried Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando in a rental car out of the smoking debris of 9/11. Even in "Two Men Arrive in a Village," a global parable of horror and repetition, absurdity bubbles up: "After eating, and drinking—if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted—the two men will take a walk around...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.' " In the wondrous "Words and Music," the survivor of a pair of disputatious sisters meditates on peak musical experiences. "Kelso Deconstructed" takes up the bleak, racist real-life stabbing of Kelso Cochrane in London in 1959, and "Meet the President!" is set in an even bleaker future where a wailing child interrupts a young teenager's elaborate virtual video game, her misery "an acute high pitched sound, such as a small animal makes when, out of sheer boredom, you break its leg." Much less successful are "Downtown" and "Parents' Morning Epiphany," which read like fragments trying to become essays. Still, Smith begins and ends with two arresting mother-daughter tales—the first nestled in alienation, the last, "Grand Union," in communion with the dead. Several of Smith's stories are on their ways to becoming classics. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
The author of award-winning novels ranging from
LJ Express Reviews
After two decades of well-received novels (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
In Smith's smart and bewitching story collection, the novelist's first (after the essay collection