Zadie Smith: sympathetic, sardonic and intriguing
ZADIE Smith writes a mean sentence — scrupulous, brilliant, intense.
Grand Union is her first collection of short fiction after a number of award-winning and bestselling novels, including White Teeth and On
Beauty, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize in 2006.
Grand Union is a grabbag of styles, experiments and voices from all over the world. Once described as a chronicler of London and its streets, Smith’s migration to New York has meant an amplification of her by turns sardonic and sympathetic worldview and her take on postcolonial cultural identity and globalisation.
One thing which emerges from this intriguing collection is that Zadie Smith is a very funny writer. The
Lazy River is an arch and biting satire of middle-class privilege about a family on holiday.
“The Lazy River is a metaphor and at the same time a real body of artificial water, in an all-inclusive hotel, in Almeria… We do not leave the hotel except to buy flotation devices. The plan is to beat our hotel at its own game. What you do is this: you drink so much alcohol that your accommodation is effectively free.”
The proposition is hilarious until the narrator does actually leave the hotel with her family while the ‘Lazy River’ is “serviced, cleaned, and sterilised”.
When the narrator returns to the hotel she meets Mariatou, and Cynthia, from Senegal and Gambia respectively, who plait hair. The narrator muses: “The men are in the poly-tunnels. The tomatoes are in the supermarket. The moon is in the sky. The Brits are leaving Europe.”
The Brits may be leaving Europe but that doesn’t mean fictional high jinks will not ensue.
Metaphor is also the name of the game in Two Men Arrive in a Village, which has “the perfection of a parable”.
There’s more metafiction in Parents’ Morning Epiphany, a whimsical catalogue written as a creative writing workshop primer.
Of the 19 stories, five first appeared in The New Yorker.
The narrators are global citizens, smart and sympathetic. In Words and Music, a New York rhapsody, the narrator tells us: “It had proved less shameful, possibly, to be mad here in New York City than to be lonely, or underemployed.”
This multicultural tale has disco and soul, and allows Smith to let her characters declaim the following kind of sentiment: “America is the kind of bitch who turns anyone who truly cares about Her into a crazy person.”
In Escape From New York, we have a slightly zany cast of characters “handling the apocalypse”.
It doesn’t work as well as the other stories, but as a magazine story it may well have passed the commuting time of New Yorkers who feel an increasing sense of claustrophobia and doom in their city and country.
The Caribbean is never far away in Smith’s imagination. In Kelso Deconstructed, Kelso is from Antigua, while Olivia is from Jamaica.
When Kelso goes to the doctor, the prescription he is given comes in the form of an email from a “Young Irish Writer” to an “Older English Writer” and discusses the injunction of “show don’t tell” in creative writing and how it may be a “slightly dishonest” approach to “an honest narrative”.
This working out of an aesthetic in the actual stories — a process-driven practice — comes about, I imagine, from Smith’s important consideration of the longer form in her essay, Two Paths for the Novel, where she interrogates the premises of realism.
It’s true that some of these stories also read like the lyrical realism she decried in Two Paths for the Novel — in other words, “like a grim satire on the profound fatuity of 21st-Century bourgeois existence”. So be it.
Smith “changes her mind”, and remains playful, even if that fun has a serious side to it: “I refused to be ashamed. Like everyone else in America these days I stand my truth.”
One of the standout stories in the collection is the outrageous Sentimental Education, which revolves around much of what DH Lawrence called “the sex thing”. Class, parenthood, and race are all subjects Smith’s work touches on. And in Sentimental Education each subject collides beautifully, and catastrophically.
Take for example this insight on parenthood: “She often heard parents comparing their small children to Nazis and fascists, but in her experience the correct analogy was the Stasi, or really any secret police.”
Smith is a compassionate writer, a writer who is not afraid to take risks or to question the codes and conventions in which she writes. As a reader, I want to hear what she has to say.
Because she says it so well, and because she has her pulse on the contemporary, Zadie Smith is an essential voice in literature today.