Reading Zadie Smith’s new short story collection, Grand Union, I kept thinking about Joni Mitchell. In part that’s because for Smith, music is a touch-stone: It is a subject and a metaphor, and you might say the stuff is right there in her sentences, too. I hear it, anyway, and certainly references to sound and music abound in Grand Union. In a story called “Words and Music” (see?), here’s how Smith writes about a scat singer:
Instead of la la do la be la it was almost al al od al eb al—like an ululation. In fact, at times it sounded like she was singing that word, ululation, over and over. Maybe she was. She sang in Spanish, she sang in English, she made us laugh, she made us cry,…
