luce (cry baby)'s Reviews > Grand Union

disclaimer: turns out i do like zadie smith's writing. i recently re-read swing times and, quelle shock, found myself really connecting to it. still, i doubt that if i were to revisit this particular collection of hers, i'd end up liking it (i can see myself hating it less...that's it). in light of my recent smith appreciation i have edited out certain bits from this review as i do not stand by certain opinions i expressed here originally.

Grand Union: Stories was one of the most insufferable collections of short stories I've ever read.
Zadie Smith is a good writer, I liked Swing Times, but this collection was far from her best. These stories are all flash, no substance, as they present readers with a rather facile shade of satire. Many of the stories attempt to be provocative, ambivalent even, but their social commentary feels cheap, shallow, and nasty. Despite their attempts to shock, they felt predictable, puerile even.

These short stories are so focused on critiquing a certain subject that they neglect all other components. To make a certain 'point' or to pass as 'shockingly' candid narratives, these stories resort to unfunny caricatures and explicit scenes (which are shocking for the sake of being shocking).
Smith combines a mixture of supposedly topical and 'in' things such as social media ((here is a short story that pokes fun at tumblr through a series of posts that seem as if taken directly by tumblr itself..which feels like really low-effort satire) that go at odds with the erudite references and elaborate speculations that punctuate these narratives.
There were also many phrases that just struck me as unnecessarily contrived: such as “It was true. What the woman had said was true, in intention, but what the girl had said was true, too, in reality” and “For a fatherless family, The Dialectic as theirs now was, this collective aspect was the perfect camouflage. There were no individual people here”.
In spite of their short length, these stories dragged. The first one, perhaps the shortest in the collection, was the least offensive one....the rest seemed to last past their 'punch line'. For example, a story focused on a certain type of British tourist (a Brexiteer group who goes to Spain to eat British food and float in a pool/river all day) is rather clumsily narrated (the 'we' and 'us' tried to make them into some sort of multi-conscious collective) and within a few lines resorts to repetition as a way of stressing their appealing behaviour.
A story that could have presented us with a woman's struggle to reconcile herself with her sexuality (in that she wants to dominate rather than submit or be equal to her partner) ends up being little more than a needlessly fetish-y tale (I don't mind explicit scenes if they have some sort of purpose/impact or if they are smoothly incorporated within the rest of the narrative) that seems to close to Fifty Shades of Grey for my comfort (view spoiler)[there is a tampon scene! Such an empowering portrayal of female sexuality! So transgressive! So utterly unnecessary! (hide spoiler)]. Not only did it strike me as being crass just for the sake of being crass but it was also full of corny repetitions ( we get it, she wants to “nullify his flesh in hers”)
This is one shallow collection of stories that seem to exude smugness (yet they are not as clever as they set themselves to be). There is no heart or depth within them, and the characters seem mere sketches that exist only to offer a certain, often idiotic, viewpoint (white, conservative, middle-class british women are the worst, we get it).
Smith is a great writer, whose social commentary can be uncomfortably piercing, but these stories seemed like a low-effort on her part. I know she can do better than this so in some ways this makes this stories all the more disappointing. If you want to read something by her, I recommend checking out her full-length works.