In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid
  • Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado (bio)
Kincaid, Jamaica. See Now Then. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

When I interviewed Jamaica Kincaid at her home in Vermont in the summer of 2012, she was in the midst of finishing her manuscript for See Now Then, her first novel in a decade. At the time she did not wish to reveal much about the new book; however, she did offer some insightful commentary that was particularly useful in approaching an initial reading of the story. She explains, “I was just trying to understand how a series of things happened to me that … had a present to them, but they were happening a long time before I became aware of them. So I began to try to understand consciousness, really” (Interview). Kincaid composes the novel in the considerably more stripped-back style that she has developed in her writings throughout the past fifteen years. She acknowledges that See Now Then is “in a more spare style” than its predecessor Mr. Potter (2002), “but it continues from that style.” Consisting of long, stream-of-consciousness sentences, the narrative shifts in its point of view between the family members of the Sweet household.

The Sweets are a family of four who live in a seemingly idyllic, rural New England community. Throughout the tale, the center of consciousness consistently returns to that of Mrs. Sweet, a writer and homemaker who immigrates to the United States from Antigua as a youth. However, it occasionally focalizes through Mr. Sweet, a composer and professor of music at the local college, or through their children Persephone and Heracles. The children’s names imply that the narratological landscape is in fact variegated. Kincaid overlays a small New England village with the grand narratives of Greek mythos, while simultaneously subtending it with the suppressed narrative of the Antiguan migrant. These shifting planes of experience engender a fractile domestic environment, along with the pervading sense that catastrophe is imminent. While some critics argue that the novel has “no real plot,” at its roiling core is a “catastrophe,” a polysemic signifier for the source of “great … upheaval” that exposes the unraveling of not only the Sweets’s marriage, but also of consciousness and even of time itself (Lee; Kincaid 53, 10). As Mrs. Sweet muses, “A whole life is made up of some small event, fleeting, something so small, deeply buried within itself, a catastrophe” (153). Critics typically isolate the Sweets’s divorce as the catastrophe which sets the narrative in motion, likely due to their myopic focus on Kincaid’s divorce from her husband in 2002. As Kincaid remarks of the novel, “The family breaks up—sounds like my life” (Interview). There is an overwhelming, reductivist critical tendency to interpret Kincaid’s writing as thinly-veiled autobiography. However, it is important to emphasize that Kincaid’s serial novelistic corpus is autofictional and draws not only upon the author’s own life but also other lives, real and imagined—lives which are often found within literature. For instance, in the novel Mr. Sweet, a Plaza Hotel “prince” from New York City, announces to Heracles that he is leaving the boy’s mother, “that stupid bitch who arrived on a banana boat,” for a younger woman from another cultural background (9, 16). It is an age-old story epitomized by Medea (c. 431 BC), the play by Euripides set in the age of ancient European empires and featuring a woman from Colchis whose husband Jason leaves her for the youthful Glauce, daughter of King Creon of Corinth.

See Now Then is a reworking of this classical story, and it offers an oblique commentary on the ways in which variations of modern imperialism impinge upon interior spaces—the private space of one’s consciousness as well as the inside of one’s home. As Kincaid writes, “The defeated and the triumphant were now settled into the normal disfigurement of everyday [End Page 1198] living” (128). Mr. Sweet can be interpreted as symbolizing the Colonial Father in that he is an absent presence whose diminutive stature belies his domineering force and his consuming desire for control. Mrs. Sweet...

pdf

Share