On Grand Union

Zadie Smith’s Grand Union amazes me. The stories are incredible, bursting with life. I’d read White Teeth a few years ago and been impressed, but I think her ability has grown a great deal since; it’s a wonder this collection hasn’t found more of an audience. There’s something in the way she merges registers — a line will read as so literary, and then she drops a piece of lowbrow humor that makes me cackle to myself.

Many of the stories are about agency: who has it, how we exert it, what it means to be limited by our own perspective or someone else’s. “Sentimental Education” is one of the finest, and on its surface it’s a university romance — but Smith inverts the gender tropes, restoring to women an agency we’re so often unwilling to grant them. Rather than a man narrating a young woman as his muse, her protagonist seeks out her own lovers as muses; even in bed she’s the one exerting her will — the man doesn’t “pull out,” she “releases him.” “Big Week” plays with agency too, centered on an Irish-American man fallen on hard times and doing everything he can to win his wife back, until in the final page or two we discover how much she has longed for an agency of her own, to be a whole person, and it makes us reconsider the stories we tell. In “Miss Adele Among the Corsets,” Smith gives us a middle-aged trans woman who has been discriminated against her whole life and lashes out at shopkeepers without realizing they mean well; her subjectivity overrules any chance of seeing things as they are. There are no noumena here, only phenomena.

A few of the stories are deconstructive — “Parents’ Morning Epiphany” reads an elementary-school student’s reading homework critically, “Mood” tells its stories between the lines — and “Kelso Deconstructed,” the single best story in the book, follows a man named Kelso through his last day on earth. I’ve seen Smith called a postmodernist, but I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. She belongs, alongside David Foster Wallace and perhaps Sally Rooney, to some post-postmodernist movement — metamodernism, the New Sincerity, whatever the term. What matters is the idea that there are no figurants, to borrow Wallace’s word from Infinite Jest: everyone has a story, and the way we write reveals what we think of other people’s stories. Smith is profoundly sensitive to others, able to write reprehensible characters without our coming to despise them, and the emotional intelligence and technical skill that takes is jaw-dropping. I adored this collection. Every line is dynamic and alive, and I yearn to write like that one day.