A novel named after a Midwestern city subjects itself to the place-based purity tests of the born and raised. For the non-native dwellers—the vacationers; the passers-through; the students and appropriators; the unaware but opinionated— it can be a treasure hunt for personal connections. The title of Natasha Stagg’s novel Grand Rapids is certainly the reason I picked up the book. A native Michigander with my own stories of GR (some of them as grand and as mythic) I also wanted to stake my claim to the city, to locate myself there and in its pages. Such is the plight of Grand Rapids’ displaced and grieving protagonist, Tess.
When her mother Sheila dies, Tess moves from working-class Ypsilanti to wealthier Grand Rapids to live with her mother’s sister Norma, her uncle, and cousins. “I suppose I’m telling you all this because you asked. That question, Where are you from? The coded proposition: prove it, something, depending,” she says, implicating the reader in a conversation that spans the book. What follows is a kind of recrimination. “What these structures, these beautiful houses and their grinning hedges, mean to me is more than you can imagine. And maybe they are something else to you, something oppressive or elusive or boring.” The story of Grand Rapids is the story of Tess, which is to say, a story of disambiguation.
The structure of Stagg’s book might conjure what Joyce Carol Oats infamously referred to as “wan little husks.” But these short melancholic sketches of Tess’s memories, alternating with jolts into her present life in Chicago, deftly perform the characteristics of most human memories, which grow feeble and fleeting or sharper and more vivid over time. Stagg gives us just enough—periodically reminding us we are in a dialogue with an older Tess who’s recounting that first summer in Grand Rapids. The narrator’s self-awareness of the structure reveals itself every so often: “[memories] are clumsily written, unexpected guests at the door in a thunderstorm, over-used and under-protected.” In Stagg’s book, both language and time are vaporous and Tess reminds us that we never enter the same (Grand) river twice: “A story, however old, represents the time in which it is repeated, not the time when it happened,” she tells us.
Stagg excels at capturing the sad-teen trope of the 90s. She maintains the paradox of the self-conscious teenager with an obsessive interior but an equally-consuming preoccupation with the body. “I was there and I wasn’t,” Tess says during a particularly sketchy trip to Newago with some older friends who shoot heroin while she’s in the bathroom. Tess engages in several risky experiences, some more dangerous than others. We see her riding shopping carts, rolling down hills, ingesting cough syrup and prescription pills, burning herself with hot metal coat hangers, riding mechanical animals at the iconic Meijer shopping center, making out with her best friend Candy, and having sex with an older man named Mickey. Tess’s risky behavior reflects the invincibility of youth, but more than that, is symptomatic of the grief she’s been forced to endure at a young age.
The untimely death of her mother may alienate her from her friends, but it bonds her to the geriatric residents at the Berrylawn Nursing Home where she works. This additional intergenerational layer puts Tess among the suffering for whom death is imminent. These Berrylawn vignettes are Stagg at her best. Lines like, “If you live too long, you’re either a burden or invisible,” get at the pain and loneliness of aging and complicate how Tess understands her own mother’s death. Hence teenage Tess must reconcile different versions of dying—being taken too soon and not soon enough. “If you take her, take me, too, and just roll me into oncoming traffic,” a wheelchair-bound resident says to her. Stagg also explores the theme of death and dying through her characters’ recreational and palliative drug use. Toward the end of the book, Tess shares an anecdote about taking fentanyl “knowing it was one of the drugs they put Sheila on when she was dying.” Stagg invites the reader to consider the conditions under which we either accept or condemn drug use, our tendency to moralize users based on whether or not they’re “junkies” or sick and dying. And aren’t we all sick and dying? “The sensation of being alive can be heightened if it is almost escaped,” Tess muses. Brushes with mortality abound in Tess’s real life and in her newly-budding virtual life.
Stagg skillfully captures the pre-vestiges of social media using internet chat rooms and reality television. Tess and Candy chat with a politician who has a cameo on Grosse Income, a show about Grosse Pointe, a rich suburb of Detroit. Stagg achieves a harrowing emotional resonance using these chats (and later, a real-life sexual encounter with the man) and shows the susceptibility of teenagers to false intimacy in virtual spaces. After an awkward phone conversation with her estranged father, Tess turns to the computer to fill this emotional and physical absence. Tess tells us how the politician wanted to make sure she knew “how special she was,” that even if she doesn’t accomplish anything great, she’ll still be incredible to him. In another chat, Tess and Candy joke that they want to see a girl in their class dead. He answers: “I could arrange that,” followed by a winking emoticon. The misogyny in this scene is part of an overall violence that bubbles above and below the surface of the book. Tess ultimately refers to her time in Grand Rapids as a nightmare.
Tess and her mother Sheila both kept diaries. Along with the TV show, online chats, and even a bizarre chain email that haunts adult Tess, the diary is another device Stagg leverages to probe ideas about language and memory, a speculative heteroglossia that challenges the novel’s (The Novel’s and Grand Rapids’) permanence and reliability. Though each vignette stands alone on merit and craft, Stagg is masterly at stacking these short yet punchy sketches to form a compelling mise-en-scene. For example, midway through the book, she sequences two scenes that culminate in a poignant diary entry. In the first scene, Tess and the politician get into a conversation about a staged party on Grosse Income. Was the party real or wasn’t it, she wants to know. “No. It was all real. A real party thrown for a TV show,” he assures her. After telling her he’d take her to a party like that one day, Tess types a message asking about his wife, but erases the text before she sends it because she knows it will make him upset.
Tess then picks up her mother’s diary and reads that Sheila “wants to start over with people,” but realizes that unfortunately you can’t take back what’s been said—it all piles onto the other things you’ve said. “I would sometimes just talk for the sake of it, so that everything I said before would be replaced and forgotten. You can never start over though,” Sheila writes. Message after message accumulates, but this glossolalia cannot overwrite Sheila’s earlier invectives. The language piles up as in a chat room; Tess, too, attempts to pick and choose what to remember, but fails. Later, Tess tells us that Sheila’s diaries “still sift through [her].” The disembodied voice of her mother’s diary is real, and, over time, mythologized. Grand Rapids is full of stories like these: real, mythic, and unreliable.
The book’s non-linear storyline bounces between past and present timelines, revealing early on that after Tess’s summer in Grand Rapids, she moves back with her father and they grow from “acquaintances” to “friends.” We learn she reunites with her Ypsilanti friends, and although she imagines she can slip back in to her old life, nothing is the same. To her old friends, she recounts things that never happened in Grand Rapids, or revises stories about her time there that include details that she learned years later, like the significance of the Calder statue, a prominent art installation in the center of the city. She did the same to her friends in GR, inventing stories about Ypsilanti. When she’s back in Ypsi, she admits, “We don’t go to the Hash Bash because we never did.” The stories the narrator chooses to tell us, true and/or imagined, accumulate, but ultimately fail to elucidate the past. Another illustration of memory’s shortcomings.
Other writers have certainly written about Michigan, in many cases with less irony, less interrogation of the constructed-ness of narrative, and a more earnest belief in place-based verisimilitude. Grand Rapids, like Ghassan Zeineddine’s story collection, Dearborn, named after another Michigan suburb, attempts to weave humor and tragedy, however, Stagg applies an ironic distance to her book’s namesake. Adult Tess looks back on her time in Grand Rapids with the earned wisdom of an insider-outsider. The protagonist’s detached assessment has become Stagg’s signature style, an “arch aloofness,” which she employs in her other books like Artless, a fragmentary collection of stories and essays, or her “Tour Diary, 2008” in The Paris Review. We may also compare Grand Rapids to Sara Maurer’s lyrical coming of age novel, A Good Animal, which evokes Michigan’s Sault Ste Marie in the mid-nineties, but unlike Stagg and Zeineddine, Maurer turns her earnest gaze toward the rural gothic. Among this recent suite of Michigan city-based novels, Grand Rapids stands out for its formal inventiveness. Stagg breaks the fourth wall of the novel periodically when she addresses (scolds?) the reader directly, “This conversation is starting to get tedious, and that’s my fault. But it’s also yours,” and also when she lapses into elliptical second person voicings to orient us to narrative time, “This was before I met you.” Her narrative mechanics are not mere containers for place-based details, though, as Stagg is an iconoclast who troubles the answer to the seldom-innocent question, “Where are you from?”
In Stagg’s imagination, the city landscape includes The Page. When choosing the novel Grand Rapids, we might be choosing to locate ourselves in the city’s past or the present—but we’re also learning about the ways language constructs a place. Stagg’s Grand Rapids is a refreshing departure from the provincialist romance. On its face, Stagg’s place-based specificity is comforting, but she is too self-aware to allow her reader that sense of comfort for long. “Every time I’m back I remember the summer I lived there less,” Tess tells us. To name a book after a city is a grand act of omission. Everything and nothing can be contained in it. Stagg’s description of Grosse Pointe includes a “bridge dotted with light that reflected onto the purple Detroit River,” an allusion to the Purple Gang (?). The geo-pious Detroiter would challenge the existence of that bridge into Grosse Pointe. But whether the bridge takes us to Grosse Pointe or Grosse Isle doesn’t matter. Fiction is not cartography, and great novels mythologize their settings in a way that maps them onto what we think we know.
