A Story I Loved: "The Embassy of Cambodia" by Zadie Smith

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A great short story by Zadie Smith today. 

What can we learn from this story? A few things. Good writing doesn’t necessarily come from plot. In fact, good writing often seems to work around the absence of plot. A writing instructor once told me that literary fiction devotes itself entirely to character. That’s what separates the work of the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, from genre fiction, or Asimov, or Lord of the Rings. All great works- but not literary fiction. Literary fiction is intensely interested in the derangement of one human psyche. 

Smith, for her part, is such a charming writer. It’s an epithet that might sound avoidant when applied to anyone else, as if charm is the absence of substance or other praises, but this kind of work proves itself time and time again to have both in spades. When applied to this kind of work- it is a very sincere compliment. Smith, I have found, is a sincere writer, and I really appreciate that about her work. I think sincerity in writing can come off as charming, and that’s sort of what the Embassy of Cambodia does for me. It invests itself, sincerely, into our lead character- Fatou. 

Fatou is a kind of governess slash maid working for a wealthy Pakistani couple and their three children. The story follows her along as various developments occur in her life- not huge, to the outside reader, but of course monumental to her own life. She has various discussions with a friend, Andrew, about everything ranging from the Holocaust to feminism. These conversations are interesting, intelligent, while also revealing a lot about both characters. The story reads easily- which is not necessarily a compliment, again, when it comes to most literary work, but Smith pulls it off, and it really works for a story which focuses so much on conversation and train of thought. Smith's ability as a writer and thinker is most evident, I think, in the way that she writes conversations. I’ve read many of Smith’s essays, and she’s razor-sharp, always on her A-game, in a way that you would like to have coffee with her and listen to her talk about any matter of subject for a few hours. That's a sense I feel reading the heights of her work, like in this story here, that her characters are interesting because she herself is an interesting individual with interesting things to say. Sometimes they will be having a discussion and I will find it entertaining to watch their minds at work, at play, almost like a cheerful, intense badminton game.

The badminton, you see, is important, and the comparison is relevant. The whole structure of this story is centered around a badminton game. The structure, for one, is structured like a badminton game. A faceless badminton game being continuously played is a recurring motif throughout the story. The badminton game meant to perhaps mirror Fatou’s own inner conflict with herself, or perhaps it’s the story of one character’s overarching conflict with the world, standing in for a group of people. If so, Smith’s done an excellent job of it. Fatou has been marginalized and wronged in various ways that are unfortunately not unique to one person but to groups of people throughout the world, but she’s real flesh-and-blood on the page. Nothing about her comes off cliched or contrived, the way I think someone with lesser acumen might be forced to play her off as. She is no martyr. Instead, she’s really the kind of character you find yourself rooting for, which is an archetype growing rarer and rarer in literary fiction these days. If anything, the story gets you rather early on to sympathize with her, and then like her, and then travel through the various peaks and dips of her progression. That’s the magic trick here, I think: in that way the reader becomes ensconced in Fatou, and the story cannot really exist without that quality of likability, sincerity, earnestness. So that when the end comes, you feel hopeful for her, and thus Smith has done her job, of guiding you through the right avenues, of asking the right questions. It’s a rare, hard thing to pull off- so much of literary fiction is giving clues, subtext in order to allow the reader to put one and one together to get two. Sometimes it’s intelligently done, and sometimes it just works on instinct, the writer knowing where to drop these cues and land the right planes.

Smith achieves both here. 

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Resources:

Read "The Embassy of Cambodia" here: zadie-smith-the-embassy-of-cambodia.pdf