What We're Reading: Language and Metaphor in Zadie Smith's Grand Union by Natanya Biskar

    The trouble with reviewing a Zadie Smith book is that the person one would most like to hear talk about a new Zadie Smith book is Zadie Smith. Grand Union, her first collection of short fiction, is a bold example of an artist living up to her own ideas. Fans of Smith’s essays will recognize her theses about fiction at work in these stories. That previous sentence makes the collection sound pedantic or insufferable; it is neither. Grand Union documents Smith’s larger artistic and intellectual project: her attempt to assert fiction’s powers by undermining its pernicious tendencies. It is a thrilling read.

Smith’s essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” interrogated “a breed of lyrical realism [that] has had the freedom of the highway for some time now.” Her essay posed this question of lyrical realism: “Is it really the closest model we have to our condition?” Smith’s answer in that essay was a resounding no, and these stories represent Smith’s search for other forms. Her solution? We need forms as diverse as our conditions. Grand Union contains multitudes. The stories are as eclectic as one is likely to find in a single collection, and while some reviewers have pointed to this as a weakness, I believe it to be Smith’s whole point. There is no one form to match our condition; the variance is her message. 

Smith gives us short stories told as fragments, as snapshots, as vignettes, as retellings, as straight narratives, as fan fiction, and even as a public school worksheet. Not all of these stories are successful, but they are all surprising. One story imagines Michael Jackson, Marlon Brando, and Elizabeth Taylor escaping New York together on September 11. Another takes place in a speculative future where a child plays an elaborate virtual reality game and becomes side-tracked by a local girl attempting to make it to her sister’s wake. In another, Smith renders war crimes in collective first person, achieving both gritty particularity and tragic universality. Because of this range, Smith’s fiction provides the rarest thrill art has to offer: the thrill of the unexpected. 

The most notable stories in Grand Union push the boundaries of the short story form or of language itself. Smith is wary of language, for she knows that it can hide as much as it can reveal. She has argued that lyricism in particular has a way of obscuring what it describes. Smith is especially suspicious of metaphor, and so she destroys her metaphors as soon as she creates them. In “Sentimental Education,” an exceptional reimagining of Flaubert’s novel, we have Monica instead of Frédéric. Monica reflects on her choices and observes: “Blind worms churning mud through their bodies is a better metaphor for what happens than roads not taken or branches unsprouted. But no metaphor will cover it really. It’s hopeless.” Even Smith’s characters understand metaphor to be insufficient. “Sentimental Education” is an instant-classic story, a hilarious and knowing examination of youth and its foibles, of sex and its complications, of class, race, gender, and the hard-won vulnerability necessary for love. 

Metaphor shows up again, and even more transparently, in “The Lazy River,” a wonderful story ostensibly about British vacationers in Spain, but really about collective reactions to the year 2016, and about the inertia produced by its events. From the get-go of “The Lazy River,” the narrator tells us that the gig is up: “Then we all climb back into the metaphor. The Lazy River is a circle, it is wet, it has an artificial current. Even if you don’t move you will get somewhere and then return to wherever you started, and if we may speak of the depth of a metaphor, well, then, it is about three feet deep, excepting a brief stretch at which point it rises to six feet four.” Notice the insistently plain language, the straightforward resisting the literary. “The Lazy River” is the encapsulation of a sentiment offered by a narrator in a different story, “Now More Than Ever,” which itself contains a metaphor for the hyper-critical discourse aided by social media. The narrator in “Now More Than Ever” writes to a high school student, “Some things are so obvious that subtle metaphor is impossible.” Does that sound familiar? In the deeply affecting story, “Two Men Arrive in a Village,” Smith describes the chief’s wife: “She believes in the ga haramata, the wind which blows here hot, here cold [...] though only some will breathe out in bloody chaos. [...] This is of course a metaphor. But she lives by it.” Smith is not quite inventing a new language here, but she is gesturing at the limitations of language. Again, this technique is not new, but it does feel revelatory in Smith’s expert hands, and necessary for her purposes. She reminds us that sentences are just sentences, but immaculately so. The clarity of her language carves space for Smith to dazzle us with her ideas, which make for good company indeed.