![]() ![]() ![]() Such a quality of serendipity, of a writer making it up as she goes along, sits at the center of “Grand Union,” which is perhaps most vivid in its sense of play. What I mean is that this work comes off as incidental in the best sense - not marginal but open, as if it didn’t have to bear the weight of the novel or the essay but could operate instead out of a more spontaneous give and take. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence.” At the same time, there’s something looser about her stories, more offhand. That’s hardly a new idea for Smith, who in her 2012 novel “ NW” insisted, “People were not people but merely an effect of language. What then do we make of the 19 stories gathered in “Grand Union,” Smith’s first collection of short fiction? There’s no mistaking the voice, with its mix of assurance and conditionality, her declaration that “ALL THE WORLD IS TEXT.” There’s a similar argument to be made about her essays, which are equally, if not more, accomplished: provocative and deeply humanistic takes on art and culture and private life. ![]() ![]() Since her 2000 debut “White Teeth,” she has been regarded primarily as a novelist: exuberant and incisive, evoking both the characters and the community of Northwest London, where she was born and raised. The truest measure of a writer may be the quality of her incidental work. ![]()
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