In "Sentimental Education," written in a close third person, a married mother in her 40s named Monica looks back on a period of sexual experimentation, including a failed college romance. I still like beer."Ī rueful awareness of aging - or at least, of being no longer young - provides another subtle through-line. We've had many many babies so we're familiar." After the aunts fly home, the narrator heads to a beer-soaked celebration of the reopening of a favorite restaurant, a popular artists' and writers' hangout where the revelers tell their waiters, "Sometimes I drank too much. "That's the face a baby makes when you try and take his rattle away. The Kavanaugh hearings get the Smith treatment in "Downtown." The narrator, a New York artist in a funk, watches the hearings with her Jamaican aunts, whose four-day visit "turned out to be the exact length of the investigation." "See that?" they comment. They want him to just go ahead and shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue like he promised." Taking a different tack, "The Canker" is a political parable about a man called the Usurper, "although he had been chosen, however misguidedly, by the people."īook Reviews Know Thyself? 'Swing Time' Says It's Complicated Like Obama," and overheard bits of dialogue like "They're still behind him. There are oblique commentaries like "The thing about undergarments is they can only do so much with the cards they've been dealt. Of the 19 selections, 11 are previously unpublished, and the rest have appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. What you couldn't say - what I can't say - is that it's the sort of carefully curated or tightly integrated sequence of stories that holds you rapt throughout. Or you could say it feels like an uneven grab bag of picked-up pieces and experiments - some of which, from an unknown or less-celebrated writer, might have stayed in a drawer. You could say it sheds light on her longform work - novels that include White Teeth, NW, and Swing Time - and that it animates ideas she explores in her essays, most recently collected in Feel Free. You could say it shows off her range - realist, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, quasi sci-fi, political and social satire, historical - and in doing so, provides something for everyone. There are several ways of looking at a story collection as wide-ranging and variable as Grand Union, Zadie Smith's first book of short fiction. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Grand Union Subtitle Stories Author Zadie Smith
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