Away from toxic gestures of power and punch lines, towards a narrative style that is ready to be questioned: Zadie Smith’s stories in “Grand Union”.
When Zadie Smith became the shooting star of new British literature in 2000 with her debut novel “White Teeth”, the charm of what was then called “multicultural” was obvious. Apart from incorrigible reactionaries, nobody wanted to deny that the peaceful coexistence of different cultures, ethnic groups and religions is possible without major conflicts. It was a “more innocent, more robust time”, wrote Zadie Smith in an essay on the cheerful “twistedness” of Hanif Kureishi’s cult novel “The Buddha from the Suburbs”, published in 1990, “when we were not yet so delicate-feeling that any incidental stupidity someone who ran along had the tremendous power to injure us to the core “.