Zadie Smith, _Grand Union_

SMITH PUBLISHED HER first novel in 2001, the better part of two decades ago, yet this is her first story collection--leading me to wonder, has she been writing short stories all that time, and is only now publishing them as a book, or is short-form fiction a later development for her? Of the nineteen stories herein, eight were published in periodicals, but none before 2013--a circumstance that inclines me to think "later development." I certainly liked the book, but I would say Smith is still getting the hang of short fiction.

Some of the stories have the virtues of her essays--that voice, with its blend of knowingness and humility, that over-the-coffee candor, that amazingly observant eye. Had "The Lazy River," "Words and Music," "Blocked," "For the King," and "Grand Union" appeared in Smith's last essay collection, they would have fit right in. They draw on her own circumstances (or seem to) in much the same way that her essays do, and given that she has an expansive idea of how essays can work, the dips into novelistic narrative techniques do little to cancel the essay-like feel.

The more obviously fictional fictions have a lot of the virtues of the novels: her knack for the way-we-live-now detail, the ear, the vivid sense of character. "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" might even become a classic, with its utterly Smith-ian curiosity about and attention to not only Miss Adele, the drag queen (and narrator) who desperately needs to replace a busted undergarment, but also the couple in whose store Miss Adele seeks the replacement.

As in many of the essays and in novels like Autograph Man and NW, we see Smith's fascination with and fiction's form, her willingness to change things up, make the bones visible--"Parents' Morning Epiphany," "Mood," "Kelso Deconstructed."

We also have some stabs at allegorical fable ("The Canker") that might just as well have stayed on the hard drive, I think, and "Escape from New York" (in which Michael Jackson narrates how he, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando got out of New York after 9/11) is a promising conceit from which nothing much grows.

Not the book I would recommend to someone who has never read Zadie Smith, I guess. Still, she hasn't published a bad one yet.