Promising story by Zadie Smith

Recovering yesterday from recent bout of The Pale King, and didn't get far with next reading - brought an edition of Thomas Mann stories, which I haven't read in many years (except for Death in Venice) along from train ride from Boston and loved getting back into Tonio Kroger, but I'm going to hold off on reading further and finishing it, will probably take the book with me on next travels - and got distracted by the Cryptic - and then settled later into current New Yorker story, by Zadie Smith, called something like Knock before Entering?, didn't finish (hope to do so tonight) - a story written in about 60 short sections (most a paragraph of two), each with boldface title - a bit of style whimsy on Smith's part that could be distracting, but I think she does a good job using the fragments to tell a story, in this case, as it evolves, of two young girls in the London area, apparently one black and other white?, who become friends through happenstance at a beach or pool (one almost drowns and is saved by the other's mum). They become best friends and the story sketches - through its segments, each a separate item like a post card of a jump cut in a movie, the long course of their evolving friendship and relationship. We'll see where it goes. I was like most readers hugely impressed by Smith's first novel, White Teeth, which presented a new and complex and multicultural London that was really news to most American readers and was a fresh, witty voice to all readers - even if the plot did go a bit over the top and derail toward the end - must greater for a first-time novelist to fail by trying too much than by being too timid or derivative. Her subsequent works have been good at times though not up to that level, and her novel set in America (On Beauty - I just had to look up the title) was way off-base about America (and other things) - but this story - perhaps part of a forthcoming novel? or collection? - is very promising and shows a great example of an author trying to work out some new techniques of form without sacrificing the pleasures that draw us to fiction, and that draw us to capture our feelings and ideas in fiction, in the first place.