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This was the story published in the edition of Granta
that included Zadie Smith as one of the Best British Novelists under
forty. The only previous Zadie Smith short stories that I have come
across were “Picnic, Lightning” and “Mrs. Begum's Son and the Private
Tutor”, published in the May Antologies whilst she was a student at
Cambridge. These two stories gave no real indication of how great
White Teeth would be, so I approached 'Martha, Martha' with some trepidation.
'Martha, Martha' is concerned with one
Martha Penk, a young British black woman who apparently believes that it is
possible to rent two bedrooms with a garden for a thousand dollars a month in
central Massachusetts. Pam Roberts, the local realty agent that she hires
to find this non-existent apartment, is a regular 'doodlenut' when it comes
down to clothes, and who has even taken to wearing slippers in her
office. Confusion reigns as her office is above one of two local branches
of Milliner's Books, and the temping agency above the other one never spells
out to its clients the potential for perplexity (although how is it that
Martha goes off in the wrong direction if she has already spoken to Pam on the
phone? Perhaps Pam is a doodlenut in other ways). From early on,
it's clear that it's going to difficult to discern what Martha wants, as she is
not the most articulate of people, her mind tends to wander, and her skin tone
successfully hides any blushes. Although Martha has an agenda: like the
heroine of Powell and Pressburger's 'I Know Where I'm Going', she has an
iterinary and a list of 'things to do' that she will not be deflected from,
despite some hints of an emotional turmoil. Pam's circumstances have also
changed "in the light of the events of last September", although it
is unclear if she changed her circumstances herself, or whether they were
changed for her. Pam becomes increasingly exasperated by Martha's abrupt
manner, and apologises that she does not know Martha all that well when she is
rude to the owners of the final apartment she sees. However, Pam
unconciously hits on what may be troubling Martha when she says, "you have
to make things work for you, work for you personally, because life is
really too short, and if they don't work, you just have to go ahead and cut
them loose".
However, one suspects the exasperation
evident in the name of the story may be Zadie Smith's own. I can identify
with Martha: I always seem to be in a hurry to go God knows where, and this
often results in me being rude to people. Maybe it's something to do with
being a writer, a writer with so many stories to tell, impatient of getting to
the end of the narrative? Another thing I like about this story is its
contemporary setting, its hints at the real world in all its preposterous
detail (Pam informs Martha that the Professor who owns the first appartment
they see is an "expert on relations between the races... so he
feels it's important to be in New York right now. In its hour of need".
There is an echo of Zadie Smith's novel The Autograph Man (i.e. Alex's
adventures on the skating rink) when she describes Martha like so: "She
had on a red overcoat and cream snow boots, putting her weight on their
edges like an ice skater". I also ascribe English words to
Mozart's Requiem, but I like it best when they sing - "Breast!
Breast!" - but that's just me. All in all, I think that 'Martha,
Martha' is Zadie Smith's most successful short story yet. You do
come away from this snapshot wondering what's going to become of Martha,
and puzzling over why the curious behaviour of the Middle Eastern
gentlemen (do they have free time to build a snowman because they've
been refused work by the temping agency?), and the vagaries of emmigration
(Amelia and Yousef think that their young family will be safer in Morocco than
America post 9/11). Yet I still believe that Zadie Smith's
fiction needs the wider canvas of a novel to be truly effective.
Authortrek Rating 9/11
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
