Volume 43, Number 5 · March 21, 1996
In the Black Room of the World
By Darryl Pinckney
The Autobiography of My Mother
by Jamaica Kincaid
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pp., $20.00
You could think of Jamaica Kincaid's first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983), a collection of stories, as an early exhibition of the essential materials that would go into the novels that followed: Caribbean childhood, domestic activity, fascination with sensation, unquiet memories of mother. Taken together the stories read like tone poems or symbolist exercises. What draws a line under them as apprentice work is Kincaid's crowded, poetic language, while in her later fictions there are few big words. She has no need for them, she can suggest intricate landscapes, actual or psychological, without them. What Kincaid retains from that maiden voyage out is a use of the first-person narrative voice that has the quality, beyond style and personality, of a hypnotic presence.
Review, 5103 words
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