PanThe National ReviewReading Zadie Smith’s latest short-story collection is like listening to hour upon hour of tales about someone else’s dreams. The stories are well written because Smith is a terrific writer. The characters are well drawn because that is Smith’s forte. Much of it is striking and much of it is memorable. And yet the stories are frustratingly fragmented and incoherent — strange and impenetrable as the subconscious itself ... My main gripe is that the stories are more or less meaningless. Page after page, we await the moment when Smith will tell us what — beyond the immediate — they’re about...But she never does ... There is no denying that Smith’s prose style is glorious. She is rather like a person striking matches in a cave: The reader sees, if only for a split second, flashing images in the darkness. Egyptian hieroglyphs. Dancing bears. A couple making love ... About the lovemaking — the sex scenes in Grand Union are grossly overwritten. Pointlessly shocking and shockingly pointless. It oughtn’t to be thought prudish to complain about this. Smith is a writer who is capable of so much more than cheap Hollywood tricks. And gratuitous lingering on bodily fluids, etc. feels like something designed to divert and distract us from . . . well, quite. What are these stories about? ... The most redeeming features of Grand Union are the well-sketched characters and how they interact ... if Grand Union falls short, it is only because she has so far to fall. Smith scatters literary brilliance to the winds, forcing the reader to go to the enormous effort of piecing it all together. It’s a big ask. To be honest, I read Grand Union cover to cover only because I was writing about it. Fully awake and autonomous, I’d probably close it at page 20, let out a yawn, and lay my head down to enjoy the sort of dreams that we all find more interesting: our own.