Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then

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See Now Then

Jamaica Kincaid

2013

The painful tension between hate and love, the two strongest and most complicatedly intertwined of emotions, drives See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid’s newest novel. Mr. and Mrs. Sweet live in a small New England village with their two children, “the young Heracles” and “the beautiful Persephone.” Mr. Sweet hates (or loves) his wife enough to compose a nocturne entitled “This Marriage is Dead,” or, “This Marriage Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now.” Mr. Sweet also hates the young Heracles enough to engage in frequent fantasies of his beheading, but he makes clear that he doesn’t want to murder his son, only to kill him. Heracles worships his mother, who loves gardening and writing and who arrived from an island in the British West Indies on a “banana boat,” yet at the same time finds her deeply ridiculous. And Mrs. Sweet? She is at once a victim of her families’ enmity and a conscious participant in it: She knows what she does to make herself hated, and, though she won’t apologize for her ways, she doesn’t blame her family for the hate her ways inspire in them.

Readers with a cursory knowledge of Kincaid’s story will recognize the Sweet family as bearing a deep resemblance to her own: Mrs. Sweet’s first name is Jamaica; she quotes from Autobiography of My Mother and Kincaid’s other previous books; and Kincaid, like Mrs. Sweet, grew up in Antigua, and lived in a small town in Vermont with her two children and composer husband, who she later divorced. This unignorable resemblance adds to the novel’s tension, which is both heightened and balmed by Kincaid’s precise, lyrical sentences, heady with repetition.

It is hard to imagine the audiobook being voiced by anyone but Kincaid, who reads the text the way she wants us to understand it; words like hate and kill sound as casual as the weather, while words that define our contemporary lives — Crate and Barrel, Verizon, Ninja Turtles — are pronounced with a kind of denaturalized incredulity. It is this pervasive denaturalization of what we have come to expect as normal — that family members should love and not hate each other, that one should not accept hate as if it were love — that makes See Now Then a source of great insight and wonder.