When I started scouting my TBR stack for #ShortStorySeptember books, I happened across Zadie Smith’s Grand Union and couldn’t remember how it had even come into my possession. To be honest, I’ve been a bit off Smith after finding Swing Time so-so, and abandoning The Fraud.

Mystery solved when I opened the book – it’s a personally signed copy, that I acquired at an incredible literary event in 2019, Broadside (among others I saw over the two days were Curtis Sittenfeld, Ariel Levy, Helen Garner and Monica Lewinsky). Clearly when I had the book signed I was totally loving Smith… which makes this review a little rude…

I struggled with Grand Union. The collection lacked cohesiveness and rhythm. While Smith is terrific at quickly and clearly establishing a narrator’s voice, I failed to become invested in the majority of her characters.

That said, two of the nineteen stories stood out. The first was Just Right, about Donovan, a white boy, who’s a bit of a loner, and who has a stutter. Donovan is tasked with doing a school assignment with a black girl, Cassie. They form a fairly strange friendship, but the real focus is on the unspoken assumptions about race, made in particular by Donovan’s mother. Her veiled comments are difficult for Donovan to interpret (but not so for the wiser, all-seeing reader).

“A sense of imagination is so much more important to me than what colour someone happens to be or how much money they have or anything like that … The only thing I care about is what’s going on in here,” she said, and thumped her narrow chest, but Donovan only looked at his shoes.

And in the next breath, his mother declares –

“People find their natural level, Donny. You’ll see when you’re older. It all works out.”

So yes, I felt for little Donny, and his first experience of having to divide loyalties between his mother and a friend.

I also found myself feeling fondly toward Michael McRae in the story, Big Week. It opens in a bar, where McRae is telling the barman about the ‘big week’ he has ahead of him. It’s slowly revealed that the week involves him moving out of the family home; pleading to have his volunteer role at the library back; and reckoning with the drug habit that cost him his job as a policeman and marriage in the first place. It’s a classic story of ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’, and the dialogue brilliantly displays the pity and disdain that others treat Michael with.

Why should that misbegotten moment – from so far back in the story, back when it was still just a matter of ten or twelve pills a day – why should that turn out to be the definitive act? … It was only what he and his colleagues had often casually referred to as the Capone Effect. When you get done, you rarely get done for the right thing.

Unfortunately, these two bright spots were not enough to redeem the other seventeen stories, which all proved a bit of a slog.

2/5

Michael meets his son in a bar –

Frank came over with a pair of Guinnesses, on a tray no less. “Your old man instructed me,” he said, and set the sloping drinks down. “He was real clear: when the kid comes, bring out the black stuff, it’s his favourite.”