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Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Grand Union
Grand Union
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Not having any academic background in ‘creative writing’I’ve never really understood the injunction ‘show don’t tell’, but now I think maybe it’s communicating the same basic concept –that there are some ideas impossible to understand or accept as direct statements, but just marginally, fleetingly comprehensible in the form of stories. At times, I do wonder if there’s something slightly dishonest in this approach, that it turns the novel into a kind of parable or illustration of a precept instead of an honest narrative.
From Kelso Deconstructed
In my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) of Swing Time, the most recent of Zadie Smith’s five novels, all of which I’ve read, I commented that she is an excellent writer and important cultural commentator, but that increasingly her novels don’t seem the best way for me to explore her themes, preferring her essays. I also quoted her as saying in an interview:
"[Musicals] are a mixture of the sublime and the obviously awful — terrible plots, offensive routines. I don't know why I'm attracted to that mix of form. It's obviously much cooler and more sensible to be attracted to perfect form. But something about perfect form repels me. My novels are like that too — I know they should be slim and controlled, but instead they're this ragbag."
I was therefore intrigued with this, her first short story collection how she handled a more slim and controlled (and both words do apply to her stories here) form.
But I do tend to prefer short-stories, if published together in a book, to cohere in some way – repeated characters and motifs are particular favourites (as in another collections I read recently: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... or even stylistically linked (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). This felt more like a premature lifetimes greatest hits collection from someone who has only released 8, not entirely successful, singles in the last 5 years, and added another 12 recent songs to make an album.
The stories in the collection are very varied in style – at little too much so: I prefer to get my variety from reading lots of different books – and my reaction varied from enjoyment (although none approached mastery or did anything particularly new or radical) to distaste or incomprehension.
Sentimental Education was perhaps my favourite, in part as I identified with the setting (not named as such but clearly a Cambridge college). Told from the perspective of a student, Monica, it includes another resident of the college, Leon, not a student but rather a friend of one, Monica’s lover, and who has somehow blagged an overnight stay into permanent accommodation, unknown to the college authorities. Annoyed by Leon’s constant presence in her boyfriend’s room and consequent intrusion into their love life Monica hopes the bedders will report him or the other students but everyone else likes him:
Part of his appeal was that he offered a vision of college life free from the burden of study. All those fantasies from the prospectus, on which the students had been sold – images of young people floating downstream or talking philosophically in high grass – that life had come true only for Leon. From the stained-glass panopticon of the library, Monica would spot him down there, at his liberty: lying on the Backs blowing smoke into the face of a cow, or in a punt with a crowd of freshers and bottle of cava. Meanwhile she wrote and rewrote her thesis on eighteenth-century garden poetry. All Monica’s life was work.
But the story – like a number in the collection – suffers from being gratuitously sexually crude.
Another favourite was Meet the President!, set in a dystopian future – although actually personally as a reader it felt at times utopian. The global citizens of the world/nowhere have rebounded from their Trumpian and Brexit defeats and triumphed.
Young Bill Peek, a true global citizen, tells the hapless locals in a coastal town in Suffolk:
‘This’– he indicated Felixstowe, from the beach with its turd castings and broken piers, to the empty-shell buildings and useless flood walls, up to the hill where his father hoped to expect him –‘is nowhere. If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. “Capital must flow.”’
Although his interlocutor senses he may not be a local:
‘From round here, are you? Or maybe a Norfolk one? He looks like a Norfolk one, Aggs, wouldn’t you say?’
Although another dystopian saga, The Canker, I found incomprehensible.
Two Men Arrive in a Village is a nicely drawn parable of the inevitable any time a country is invaded or suffers a revolution or civil war, the tone cleverly treading a thin line between satire of cliché, and horror at the endless repetition of looting, murder and rape (usually in that order).
After eating, and drinking – if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted – the two men will take a walk around, to see what is to be seen . This is the time of stealing. The two men will always steal things, though for some reason they do not like to use this word and, as they reach out for your watch or cigarettes or wallet or phone or daughter, the short one, in particular, will say solemn things like ‘Thank you for your gift’ or ‘We appreciate the sacrifice you are making for the cause’, though this will set the tall one laughing and thus ruin whatever dignified effect the short one was trying to achieve. At some point, as they move from home to home, taking whatever they please, a brave boy will leap out from behind his mother’s skirts and try to overpower the short, sly man.
At the other end of the spectrum, Downtown seemed to be trying too hard to portray an exaggerated New York:
The New York Public School Calendar does not recognize funks, personal, existential, artistic or otherwise. School starts on September 4th and that’s that. The only way to get out of it is to take an ordinary belt, tie it round your neck, loop it round a door handle and then sit suddenly upon the floor. Although this method likely won’t get your kid out of having to turn up on that first day, it will at least mean you don’t have to take them.
It was September 4th – I had to take them. In the line to get through the school gates – a momentous line, which snakes from Café Loup all the way down Sixth Avenue like a tapeworm of the Devil – a parent started talking to me about his family’s transformative summer break to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. It had taken three planes to get there, they’d gone to bed with monkeys and woken up with sloths and the whole trip had been utterly transformative: transformative to escape the American ‘situation’, transformative for him personally, and for his wife, and for the children, but especially for him. Transformative. I peered at this dude very closely. I hadn’t seen him since last September 4th but to my painterly eye he didn’t appear especially transformed. Seemed like much the same asshole.
On the sad, childless walk home, I heard a very old white lady outside Citarella exclaim loudly, into her phone: ‘But he’s not my friend, he’s my driver!’To which a tall boy in sequinned culottes with a Basquiat ’fro – who happened to be passing – replied: ‘Lady, you are GOALS.’My concern about both jungles and forests is that you can’t really imagine anything like that happening in them.
Kelso Reconstructed is a fictionalised re-telling of the true-life story of the murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill in 1959 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_...), but overly self-consciously metafictional:
They are engaged to be married, although they will never marry: by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday 16 May 1959, the last day of Kelso’s life. One thing about the last day of our lives is we almost never know that it is the last day – from here stems ‘dramatic irony’– and no more did Kelso know it. His mind was full of the pain in his thumb and the heat in the room … Kelso, caught in the slipstream of life, without the hindsight of either reader or author, could think only of his own pain.
And also contains what seems to be an odd authorial nod to Sally Rooney when a young Irish nurse called Rooney hands Kelso a prescription that reads:
From: YoungIrishWriter@ gmail.com
To: OlderEnglishWriter@ yahoo.com
Mood simply consists of a seemingly rather random collection of descriptions of moods for example:
Absurd Modern Mood
‘And the crazy thing is,’ said the Professor of the Philosophy of History to the Professor of the History of Philosophy, ‘how difficult an easy life is! I mean, imagine what a difficult life feels like!’ A nearby graduate, Zenobia, presently assembling a sly dinner out of Philosophy Department canapés – while simultaneously trying to disguise the look of actual hunger in her eyes – took a moment. Suddenly she was overcome by the sense that none of this was real. Not the canapés, not the professors, not the Philosophy Department, nor the whole city campus. (Zenobia has ninety-six thousand dollars in loans. She is studying Philosophy, period.)
Two stories published in the New Yorker were reviewed and discussed at the time at the Mookse and Gripes website, generally not that favourably.
The Lazy River: http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...
Now More Than Ever (I share the bemusement of several commentors):
http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...
And several stories rather passed me by altogether, including the title one - partly as they seemed to be essays whose points were overly disguised by turning them into stories.
Overall, not a collection that I could particularly recommend - one that made be hanker for the novels, however much they may be a "ragbag" they are at least a coherentish ragbag, and that if anything this experience further supported my view that Smith is at her best as an essayist. 2.5 stars
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
From Kelso Deconstructed
In my review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) of Swing Time, the most recent of Zadie Smith’s five novels, all of which I’ve read, I commented that she is an excellent writer and important cultural commentator, but that increasingly her novels don’t seem the best way for me to explore her themes, preferring her essays. I also quoted her as saying in an interview:
"[Musicals] are a mixture of the sublime and the obviously awful — terrible plots, offensive routines. I don't know why I'm attracted to that mix of form. It's obviously much cooler and more sensible to be attracted to perfect form. But something about perfect form repels me. My novels are like that too — I know they should be slim and controlled, but instead they're this ragbag."
I was therefore intrigued with this, her first short story collection how she handled a more slim and controlled (and both words do apply to her stories here) form.
But I do tend to prefer short-stories, if published together in a book, to cohere in some way – repeated characters and motifs are particular favourites (as in another collections I read recently: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... or even stylistically linked (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). This felt more like a premature lifetimes greatest hits collection from someone who has only released 8, not entirely successful, singles in the last 5 years, and added another 12 recent songs to make an album.
The stories in the collection are very varied in style – at little too much so: I prefer to get my variety from reading lots of different books – and my reaction varied from enjoyment (although none approached mastery or did anything particularly new or radical) to distaste or incomprehension.
Sentimental Education was perhaps my favourite, in part as I identified with the setting (not named as such but clearly a Cambridge college). Told from the perspective of a student, Monica, it includes another resident of the college, Leon, not a student but rather a friend of one, Monica’s lover, and who has somehow blagged an overnight stay into permanent accommodation, unknown to the college authorities. Annoyed by Leon’s constant presence in her boyfriend’s room and consequent intrusion into their love life Monica hopes the bedders will report him or the other students but everyone else likes him:
Part of his appeal was that he offered a vision of college life free from the burden of study. All those fantasies from the prospectus, on which the students had been sold – images of young people floating downstream or talking philosophically in high grass – that life had come true only for Leon. From the stained-glass panopticon of the library, Monica would spot him down there, at his liberty: lying on the Backs blowing smoke into the face of a cow, or in a punt with a crowd of freshers and bottle of cava. Meanwhile she wrote and rewrote her thesis on eighteenth-century garden poetry. All Monica’s life was work.
But the story – like a number in the collection – suffers from being gratuitously sexually crude.
Another favourite was Meet the President!, set in a dystopian future – although actually personally as a reader it felt at times utopian. The global citizens of the world/nowhere have rebounded from their Trumpian and Brexit defeats and triumphed.
Young Bill Peek, a true global citizen, tells the hapless locals in a coastal town in Suffolk:
‘This’– he indicated Felixstowe, from the beach with its turd castings and broken piers, to the empty-shell buildings and useless flood walls, up to the hill where his father hoped to expect him –‘is nowhere. If you can’t move, you’re no one from nowhere. “Capital must flow.”’
Although his interlocutor senses he may not be a local:
‘From round here, are you? Or maybe a Norfolk one? He looks like a Norfolk one, Aggs, wouldn’t you say?’
Although another dystopian saga, The Canker, I found incomprehensible.
Two Men Arrive in a Village is a nicely drawn parable of the inevitable any time a country is invaded or suffers a revolution or civil war, the tone cleverly treading a thin line between satire of cliché, and horror at the endless repetition of looting, murder and rape (usually in that order).
After eating, and drinking – if it is a village in which alcohol is permitted – the two men will take a walk around, to see what is to be seen . This is the time of stealing. The two men will always steal things, though for some reason they do not like to use this word and, as they reach out for your watch or cigarettes or wallet or phone or daughter, the short one, in particular, will say solemn things like ‘Thank you for your gift’ or ‘We appreciate the sacrifice you are making for the cause’, though this will set the tall one laughing and thus ruin whatever dignified effect the short one was trying to achieve. At some point, as they move from home to home, taking whatever they please, a brave boy will leap out from behind his mother’s skirts and try to overpower the short, sly man.
At the other end of the spectrum, Downtown seemed to be trying too hard to portray an exaggerated New York:
The New York Public School Calendar does not recognize funks, personal, existential, artistic or otherwise. School starts on September 4th and that’s that. The only way to get out of it is to take an ordinary belt, tie it round your neck, loop it round a door handle and then sit suddenly upon the floor. Although this method likely won’t get your kid out of having to turn up on that first day, it will at least mean you don’t have to take them.
It was September 4th – I had to take them. In the line to get through the school gates – a momentous line, which snakes from Café Loup all the way down Sixth Avenue like a tapeworm of the Devil – a parent started talking to me about his family’s transformative summer break to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. It had taken three planes to get there, they’d gone to bed with monkeys and woken up with sloths and the whole trip had been utterly transformative: transformative to escape the American ‘situation’, transformative for him personally, and for his wife, and for the children, but especially for him. Transformative. I peered at this dude very closely. I hadn’t seen him since last September 4th but to my painterly eye he didn’t appear especially transformed. Seemed like much the same asshole.
On the sad, childless walk home, I heard a very old white lady outside Citarella exclaim loudly, into her phone: ‘But he’s not my friend, he’s my driver!’To which a tall boy in sequinned culottes with a Basquiat ’fro – who happened to be passing – replied: ‘Lady, you are GOALS.’My concern about both jungles and forests is that you can’t really imagine anything like that happening in them.
Kelso Reconstructed is a fictionalised re-telling of the true-life story of the murder of Kelso Cochrane in Notting Hill in 1959 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_...), but overly self-consciously metafictional:
They are engaged to be married, although they will never marry: by the time the next sentence arrives it will be Saturday 16 May 1959, the last day of Kelso’s life. One thing about the last day of our lives is we almost never know that it is the last day – from here stems ‘dramatic irony’– and no more did Kelso know it. His mind was full of the pain in his thumb and the heat in the room … Kelso, caught in the slipstream of life, without the hindsight of either reader or author, could think only of his own pain.
And also contains what seems to be an odd authorial nod to Sally Rooney when a young Irish nurse called Rooney hands Kelso a prescription that reads:
From: YoungIrishWriter@ gmail.com
To: OlderEnglishWriter@ yahoo.com
Mood simply consists of a seemingly rather random collection of descriptions of moods for example:
Absurd Modern Mood
‘And the crazy thing is,’ said the Professor of the Philosophy of History to the Professor of the History of Philosophy, ‘how difficult an easy life is! I mean, imagine what a difficult life feels like!’ A nearby graduate, Zenobia, presently assembling a sly dinner out of Philosophy Department canapés – while simultaneously trying to disguise the look of actual hunger in her eyes – took a moment. Suddenly she was overcome by the sense that none of this was real. Not the canapés, not the professors, not the Philosophy Department, nor the whole city campus. (Zenobia has ninety-six thousand dollars in loans. She is studying Philosophy, period.)
Two stories published in the New Yorker were reviewed and discussed at the time at the Mookse and Gripes website, generally not that favourably.
The Lazy River: http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...
Now More Than Ever (I share the bemusement of several commentors):
http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/20...
And several stories rather passed me by altogether, including the title one - partly as they seemed to be essays whose points were overly disguised by turning them into stories.
Overall, not a collection that I could particularly recommend - one that made be hanker for the novels, however much they may be a "ragbag" they are at least a coherentish ragbag, and that if anything this experience further supported my view that Smith is at her best as an essayist. 2.5 stars
Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC
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Reading Progress
August 7, 2019
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August 7, 2019
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August 7, 2019
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August 13, 2019
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August 15, 2019
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Finished Reading
September 1, 2019
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2019
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Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer
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Aug 15, 2019 02:00PM
Oh dear.
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From round here, are you? Or maybe a Norfolk one? He looks like a Norfolk one, Aggs, wouldn’t you say?
I started this optimistically - so far I have to agree with your review (though I did enjoy the parable of The Lazy River). I do think the short story can be a capacious form, but she's not even trying to engage with its conventions by subverting them, for example.There aren't any of the pleasures of the form in these stories. However, I do enjoy her 'voice', so I will carry on and approach them as fiction-based essays (not sure whether this is a thing or not). Her nod to Rooney might be a nod back to one of the things she did in White Teeth, where the narrator dismissively describes a 'boring' (I think) gang of boy smokers called Ian, Martin, Julian. Maybe she's passing the torch to Rooney after taking it from the above-named. (less)
That’s that sorted then - I was about to press “request” on NetGalley but now I won’t.
Patricia Highsmith's Snail wrote: "I started this optimistically - so far I have to agree with your review (though I did enjoy the parable of The Lazy River). I do think the short story can be a capacious form, but she's not even tr..."Not sure if I imagined the Rooney think but it did seem a bit blatant (I missed the White Teeth one).
Neil wrote: "That’s that sorted then - I was about to press “request” on NetGalley but now I won’t."Well you might like it - I found some of the stories incomprehensible though, and none that really blew me away.
I think setting bias played a part as if I looked at the two I liked, one was set in Cambridge and the other in Suffolk, involving a member of the global elite who was mistaken for someone from Norfolk.
Whereas the ones (lots) that seemed about New York and academia left me cold.
I was, like you, disappointed. I have at least 2 of her novels on my shelves, but haven't read them yet. You have done a great service with your detailed review. I found the range of styles jarring. I wanted to like this, and I gave it 3 stars though your 2 stars may be closer to what it deserves.
Some of the early novels are great, as are her essays. Although reading review I realise I criticised it for too much variety, whereas the last, highly anticipated, short story collection. I read recently I criticised for stories which all felt like variations on the same theme. I guess I really just aren’t a great fan of short stories.
Paul wrote: "Some of the early novels are great, as are her essays. Although reading review I realise I criticised it for too much variety, whereas the last, highly anticipated, short story collection. I read r..."I have loved the short story genre for a long time. Perhaps I gave the book a slightly higher rating than I thought it deserved because I was reluctant to be too traditional.
In defense of the genre, the work of Alice Munro as well as the late William Trevor are probably the best examples of 20th century short stories.
Munro is a case in point. I read one of her books 6 years ago when she won the Nobel and it just wasn’t for me at all.
