GRAND RAPIDS, by Natasha Stagg
Grand Rapids is one of those Midwestern cities that is often described, a bit insistently, as “vibrant.” It’s the second largest city in Michigan, a former industrial center whose downtown revitalization was partly subsidized by the DeVos family and is now home to no less than four Christian colleges. Its name is somewhat misleading. The river that runs through the city was dammed in 1835; there have been no rapids for nearly a century.
Tess, the narrator of Natasha Stagg’s sharp and unassuming second novel, “Grand Rapids,” moves to the city from Ypsilanti when she is 15. Although she is in many ways inexperienced — she’s never had sex, been on a city bus or met a Jew — she has suffered more than her fair share of hardship. Her mother recently died from cancer, and her father is largely absent.
Her aunt and uncle, who have taken her into their big house in the suburbs, try to make her part of their family, but every kindness is tainted with pity. She’s given a bedroom in their finished basement, where she gets high on Robitussin, falls into long, Prozac-induced fugues, and occasionally presses hot metal objects into the back of her thigh. “I imagined something happening to me, anything, to shock me back into my brain,” she reflects.
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. On Sundays, Tess goes with her aunt and uncle to the “cool church,” where a rock band leads worship and everyone wears jeans. (When Tess later meets two attractive tattooed girls at a party gushing about a youth group trip, she wonders if “there was another, cooler, cool church.”)
The novel takes place during a single summer in the early aughts, the heyday of reality TV, megachurches and chat rooms. Tess spends her free hours on the household PC, flirting with a Michigan politician who tells her that she has a bright future and encourages her to travel, though she already senses the limits of her horizon. “The thing that was keeping me here was my age,” she realizes. “Once I was an adult, though, it would be money.”
The one bright spot in her life is Candy, a beautiful classmate who introduces her to PJ Harvey’s music and possesses that magnetic, slightly manic charm that shines more intensely against a dull backdrop. Tess is in love with her, and while they occasionally make out in the shower, they also spend a truly tedious amount of time riding around with men they meet at the 24-hour coffee shop, 20-something guys who do heroin in trailers in the rural outskirts of Fremont and Newaygo and whom Tess senses will soon die of an overdose: “Life was a loop, their habits said, not a hill to climb.”
Stagg spent some formative years in Grand Rapids, though her previous work — two story collections and a novel — mines the more glamorous, celebrity-studded terrain of New York’s art scene and influencer culture in L.A. There is, improbably, a celebrity thread in “Grand Rapids” as well. Tess and her aunt and uncle watch a reality show called “Grosse Income,” a fictional “Desperate Housewives”-like program that takes place in the luxe Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. (One of its peripheral characters is the politician Tess has been chatting with online). Tess’s uncle complains that the show is fake and overproduced. “Anything can be edited to seem more like a story,” he says, whereas real life has an “arc like a heart monitor.”
It’s a pointed aesthetic statement: “Grand Rapids” similarly has an arc like a heart monitor, one attached to a very depressed teenage girl. Stagg, who has described her style as “artless,” is writing against the grain of hyper-stylization and painstaking curation that dominates life in the internet age. The novel ultimately resists the overdetermined escape plot of the bildungsroman, which often recounts an aimless youth in the hinterlands that launches the narrator into a more cosmopolitan life. Tess is recalling this summer a decade later, and it gradually becomes clear that her life, too, has been more loop than climb. (She has made it only as far as the Chicago suburbs.) She’s trying to understand how Grand Rapids made her the person she has become, though she’s conscious that any story reveals more about the present than the past. Hindsight is also a kind of curation, and often corrodes what it hopes to reclaim. “All I know is that whenever I move to a new apartment, I detest the one I left,” Tess observes, “the one I used to love because it was mine.”
GRAND RAPIDS | By Natasha Stagg | Semiotext(e) | 221 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
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