Grand Rapids - (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents) by Natasha Stagg (Paperback)

About the Book

"Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder's public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001--the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A new novel from the celebrated author of Surveys, set in the Michigan suburbs of the early 2000s.

Installed alongside the Grand River in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, Alexander Calder's public sculpture La Grande Vitesse has come to symbolize the city. Tess moves there from Ypsilanti, Michigan in 2001--the same year that her mother dies, when everything begins to move, for her, in slow motion. Thrust into adolescence nearly rudderless, fifteen-year-old Tess is intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. A decade later, inspired by diary entries and TV reruns, she remembers this summer in the suburbs as the one that redefined her. Its echoes of death are frozen in time like the waves represented in the Calder sculpture or the concrete steps leading down to the churning river. She comes to see Grand Rapids as a collection of architecture and emblems, another home to which she cannot return.

Review Quotes

"An adept stylist, one sensitive to a generalized moral state of degradation, with all its sensual and ugly indicia. ... Stagg, as almost no one else writing today, has her eyes peeled for that 'other side where people are disposed.'"
--Ann Manov, Bookforum

"Stagg's writing is precise and unaffected, and her short chapters have the lingering effect that great songs do: Their power's not just in the notes you hear but in the silences between."
--Dave Kim, The New York Times

"The novel's most impressive accomplishment is its rendering of Tess's grief, which is less an outpouring than a slow bleed into the general anomie of teenage life. Stagg inhabits Tess's consciousness with a luminous deadpan, a gaze that grasps, without amusement or malice, the garish absurdities of life in West Michigan: the sad local royalty of Dutch surnames, the clever café menus offering Smashing Pumpkin lattes and Pearl Jam Danishes."
--Meghan O'Gieblyn, The New York Times

About the Author

Natasha Stagg is the author of Surveys: A Novel (2016), Sleeveless: Fashion, Image, Media, New York 2011-2019 (2019), and Artless: Stories 2019-2023 (2023). She lives in New York City.