In See Now Then, the brilliant and evocative new novel from Jamaica Kincaid--her first in ten years--a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters--a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England--as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then. Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear. See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Since the publication of her first short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, which was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling--creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.
BIO
Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John's, Antigua. Her books include At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother. She lives with her family in Vermont.
REVIEWS
"Writers make uncomfortable kin . . . There's a reflex in every writer that trumps even the maternal instinct, a part of her that, even while her newborn suckles at her breast, is cold-eyed, choosing words to describe the pit-bull clamp of its gums, the crusted globe of its skull, with the same dispassion which she might describe fellow passengers on a bus . . . The intimate treachery, the permanent duality that this entails . . . are lucidly examined in Jamaica Kincaid's latest novel . . . Kincaid has the gift of endowing common experience with a mythic ferocity... [She] is one of our most scouringly vivid writers." --Fernanda Eberstadt, New York Times Book Review
"Most readers feel protective of that little unit, the family. When it breaks, as it so often does and most certainly will in this story, we experience the tragedy . . . Was it ever any different? Did Mr. Sweet, who so utterly resembles the absent-minded Mr. Ramsay from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, ever truly love Mrs. Sweet, a modern-day Mrs. Ramsay--the mother who struggles every day to save her family from destruction, or just unhappiness?" --Susan Salter Reynolds, Newsday
"Pervasive in See Now Then . . . is bawdy humor and unabashed rage and sorrow . . . The theme of time's inexorable march and how it colors our perspective is reinforced by sometimes abruptly shifting recollections. . . Those who treasure Kincaid's quirky lyricism will no doubt enjoy the challenge." -- USA Today
Farrar Straus Giroux / February 04, 2014
0.51" H x 8.32" L x 5.47" W (0.37 lbs) 182 pages