Koffee Kletz Kafe sign, Grand Rapids, Michigan (1982) | John Margolies / Library of Congress / No known restrictions
The author Natasha Stagg has been described by Bookforum as a “cool person in downtown New York who writes about the same.” Her first novel, Surveys (2016), and her two essay collections, Sleeveless (2019) and Artless (2023), deal with a perception-obsessed internet culture. But her latest novel, Grand Rapids (Semiotexte, 2025), couldn’t be further from this scene. The book is set in the early aughts, in a Midwestern American city where the only culturally “important” monument is a public sculpture by Alexander Calder—La Grande Vitesse. Tess, the teenage protagonist, confesses disinterest in the sculpture: “I either thought nothing of it, or thought it was an eyesore.”
In Grand Rapids, Tess is navigating a place she was never meant to be. After Tess’s mom is diagnosed with cancer, she moves Tess and her from the college town Ypsilanti to the more affluent Grand Rapids, to be closer to their immediate family. When her mom passes away suddenly, Tess—the new kid at school—becomes a wary tenant in her Aunt Norma’s unfamiliar middle-class household. In between working at a nursing home and avoiding going back to Norma’s, Tess spends her time where a bored teen stuck in the suburbs might: at the mall, in parking lots, and in coffee shops, often getting high. But her loneliness untethers her from the world. With no adults to look up to, she bumbles her way among a cast of Midwestern Gothic characters, often unable to differentiate the bad from dangerous: dementia patients who ask to be pushed into traffic, a predatory politician with heart problems, a kid with a swastika tattooed on his chest. “The way women grow up, is into each other,” Tess says. “Everyone turned into their parents, and I became some random person.”
The story is told in a series of nonlinear vignettes, recounted by the present day, adult Tess to an unnamed second person. Attempting to trace the fragments of the cough syrup–soaked summer she spent in Grand Rapids, Tess struggles to make a coherent narrative out of a period of her life ruptured by grief. The memories pile on top of each other like a shuffled deck of cards, often placing a distance between Tess and the reality of her past as she struggles to sort it out. She wonders if she even needs to: “Anything can be edited to seem more like a story, and real life isn’t a story. Well, it is, but it’s a pretty unconventional one, with an arc like a heart monitor.”
Even as she underscores the adult Tess’s sense of uncertainty about the past, Stagg allows her reader access to those teenage years through richly sensory descriptions. Tess, like Stagg the cultural critic, is a sharp observer. In scenes with Candy—Tess’s best friend (and sometimes more)—Stagg delicately suspends her narrator between the book’s two poles: the intensity of memory and the skepticism of the present. Tess recalls the time Candy introduced her to the 1993 PJ Harvey song “Rid of Me” in vivid detail: the color of Candy’s slip dress, her freckly skin, the feel of the carpeted floor of her bedroom. From the present, Tess says, “When I send Candy that PJ Harvey song now, in a text, she remembers it being a favorite of hers, but not its significance to me, or to us. When I hear it, I am reminded of her, of the newness of drugs, of an orgasm I had yet to experience, of a time when listening to music, even, was novel.”
Like Tess, Stagg lived in Grand Rapids during her teenage years and moved around after losing her mother. The novel is an exercise in remembrance without nostalgia. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, the author described her fictional alter-ego as “this person looking back on her teenage years and saying, ‘That couldn’t have been the best time in my life. I hope something better happens eventually.’”
The novel opens mid-scene to an episode of Grosse Income, a reality TV show about “the wealthy and the washed-up” in a Midwestern town. Tess is glued to the screen because the show features the much older man, a local politician, with whom she has been having an online relationship for months. Tess explains, “It was the first time someone I personally knew was on television.” It’s the first summer after 9/11, and the shadow of the disaster looms over Grand Rapids. Meanwhile, the prominence of the internet and reality television in Tess’s life weave a throughline between this new novel and Stagg’s previous work, in which facts clash with truth and perceived reality. At the dinner table, Tess’s uncle complains about the news. “If we watched real life on the TV … we would be bored out of our minds. Everything is for the sake of entertainment. [The news] is just another industry,” he says. Stagg uses Tess’s position as a dissociated teenager drawn to not yet ubiquitous media forms to chronicle a culture on the threshold of massive political and cultural change. Soon enough, the larger world will arrive in Grand Rapids.
How do you tell somebody the story of where you are from? “I can see you tidying up my background, my youth, in a phrase, and no matter what it may be—working class, suburban, white trash, middle America—it doesn’t work,” argues Tess. Grand Rapids is not your regular small-town blues story, but it uses the familiar framework as a background to question the essence of memory, identity, grief, and time. Tess wasn’t born in Grand Rapids, but it is where life happened to her.
