[Semiotext(e); 2025]
The novel Grand Rapids, by Natasha Stagg, is less about a particular place and more about a state of mind: teenage girldom unmoored by grief and relocation. Before the novel starts, Tess’s mother dies of cancer. Before that, her dad runs off and her mom moves them from Ypsilanti to Grand Rapids, from the east to the west side of Michigan, from a small half-baked city near liberal Ann Arbor to a larger city surrounded by countryside and conservatism. After her mother’s death, Tess is passed off to her aunt and uncle who have two sons already, so Tess is relegated to the basement. From there, Grand Rapids spirals, the book’s structure replicates the narrator’s life as it shuttles in and out of past and present.
Short chapters move through the chronology of the summer of 2002 and then veer towards Tess’s present as a 20-something-year old looking back on adolescence. Present-tense Tess narrates to an unidentified “you” in a tone that wavers between romantic and platonic. “Do I have a type?” she asks. “My friends think so. You think so. But I can see that all these people are different from one another. They only look and act the same.” Tess is not exactly trying to understand what happened that summer — because I think she understands how impossible it is to separate actions from grief — but to draw a straight line from it to who she has become: “That summer must have been pivotal. What about the way things turned out has turned me into what I am — and what, exactly, am I?”
From these blinks of lucidity, the book circles back to the summer when Tess was fifteen. Tess and her best friend in Grand Rapids, Candy, get high on cough syrup. They go to Blues on the Mall, an outdoor concert series downtown where teenagers from the fringes gather. They try other pills, in addition to Tess’s anti-depressants. They meet aimless, older guys and have sex for the first time. Another girl, Lauren, teaches Tess how to play Cherry Bomb with a cigarette butt. “It was when you put the still-lit cherry on your forearm and the other person presses their arm against it, too.” The game leaves a scar when the burning ash touches her flesh. Later, Tess adds more of her own scars: she burns a coat hanger and presses it into her arm. Within teenage Tess, grief and abandonment collide with suburban discontent to magnify each pain and pile on more.
Mickey, the guy that Tess loses her virginity to, has no interest in who she is as a person. To be fair, she doesn’t have much interest in him either, except in a curious kind of way when she asks questions about what it was like in jail and about his band. But she’s fifteen and he’s somewhere in his early twenties. Still, Mickey seems like an innocent lost youth when compared to the politician who Tess meets in a chat room back when she lived in Ypsilanti. She brings this relationship with her to Grand Rapids where she and Candy chat with him together. Grand Rapids opens with Tess seeing the politician on a reality TV show called Grosse Income, standing around at a party: “I’d never really met the politician, but I felt that I knew him better than I knew a lot of people.” Both the politician’s chats and scenes from TV cycle in and out of the novel too, reminders that the world of adults is not any more civil or adjusted than Tess’s world of disaffected youth.
There isn’t a person unscathed by everyday loss, childhood, parents, an idea of who we are or could be. Stagg drops Tess off this cliff of losses to see how far and how hard Tess can tumble and still move away from Grand Rapids, the state of mind. Throughout the novel, the litany of bad decisions that she makes and are made for her governs Tess’s desire to grow up faster. In the process of wanting to arrive more quickly at who she will become, Tess becomes who she will always be. This is the nightmare of being a teenager, how the temporary bleeds into permanence in a developing mind and body. Compared to Candy and Mickey, she’s lucky that her dad eventually returns and takes her back to Ypsilanti. But she doesn’t ever leave really. Tess in the present reflects a lot on how drugs help burn away reality: “Minds are capable of a lot, or of everything, meaning all that we know, and I’ve intentionally dissolved parts of my brain with chemical shards and liquids, distressing existence’s fabrics each time.” The present Tess is so dead pan and depressed that the answer to the question she asks — about if that summer affected her life — is obviously yes.
So why even ask it? Maybe another way to put the question is how, after these losses, can we continue to be human, to have compassion, to go on living? How can we be vulnerable again? Balancing out Tess’s discontent are some chapters set in the nursing home where she’s worked since before her mom got sick. It is in this environment of adults become children where Tess seems most at ease. The residents are near death, no doubt replicas of Tess’s mother in the advanced stage of cancer. They are self-centered and throw tantrums, but she also sees their loneliness and the “drug-induced lies that once stood for those things that were once real to them.” In a book where the abysses between and within people are emphasized, these moments bring some needed empathy, a reminder of the other kind of power of human relationships: the ability to help each other heal.
Natasha Stagg is an acute observer who can barricade a moment or people into a single sentence, like this one: “The people that stay in Grand Rapids spend money to sit.” She is a New York City based writer and critic who has written one novel, one book of criticism and one collection of short stories. In an interview at SSENSE, Stagg says she was rereading The Virgin Suicides at the time of composing Grand Rapids, another book of teenage suburban girlhood gone wrong. Grand Rapids is as far as I want to go into anyone’s misery. It’s the kind of bad dream I’m happy to wake up from, relieved that it didn’t happen to me. This writhing is also the pull of the novel — an investigation into the human capacity to adapt to pain and hurt, to grow around it. Twenty-year old Tess also seems fascinated with rummaging through the past: moments of drug-induced splendor, of pure teenage silliness despite it all. She is more herself for knowing it’ll always be there.
Amber Ruth Paulen is a writer and educator living in rural Michigan. She earned her MFA in fiction at Columbia University and is currently writing a multi-generational novel. www.amberpaulen.com.
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