Martha, Martha by Zadie Smith, 2003
The magic trick:
A shift in perspective near the end of the story that casts new light on Martha
Martha is an immigrant from Nigeria. Pam is a recently divorced real-estate agent in Boston. They spend a winter day together looking for apartments.
The reader mostly stays in Pam’s point of view. As such, we don’t know precisely what ails or motivates Martha. She’s a mystery. Pam is self-involved, limited in her emotional intelligence, and misreads many signals because of cultural ignorance. It doesn’t help that Martha is genuinely inscrutable.
So it’s quite a shift in the story when the reader is able to break free from Pam and follow Martha into the restroom where we see her sob over a photo of a man holding a young boy. Now we’re starting to get some answers.
The story soon returns to Pam’s point of view and not long later ends.
So the change to see Martha more clearly still only provides clues; no clarity. But it’s enough to open up new ideas about both Martha and Pam and the entire story.
And that’s quite a trick on Smith’s part.
The selection:
‘Oh, I know where it is—it’s very nice.’
‘It costs too much, man,’ said Martha, tutting loudly, removing a pair of childish mittens, ‘But I came right from London and I didn’t have any place arranged—I just arksed the taxi to take me to the nearest hotel—I been there a week, but I can’t afford it for much longer, you know?’
Usually Pam would use these minutes in the office to ascertain something about likely wealth, class, all very gently—what kind of house, what kind of taste, what kind of price—but she had been wrong about English accents before, not knowing which were high class, which not. Or whether high class meant money at all—if you watched PBS as Pam did you soon found out that in England it could, often did, mean the exact opposite.
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