See Now Then

December 10, 2012
In her first novel in a decade, Kincaid (Autobiography of My Mother) brings her singular lyricism and beautifully recursive tendencies to the inner life of Mrs. Sweet, who is facing the end of her marriage, and who, over the course of the book, considers the distinctions between her nows and her thens, particularly when recounting what was while the memories bleed with a pain that still is. Particularly touching is Kincaid’s rendering of motherhood. The immediacy of Mrs. Sweet’s small son’s toys—Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers—creates a significant foil to the ethereal interior echoes. Such is the reality of parenting: what is imagined or remembered loses every battle against plastic warriors and the demands of children. What’s startling is the presumably autobiographical nature of the plot. The family lives in Bennington, Vt., like Kincaid, and Mr. Sweet is a composer who leaves his wife for a younger musician, as was the case with Kincaid’s former husband. While evidence of fictionalization is obvious (naming the children after Greek myths), the book feels precariously balanced between meticulous language and raw emotion. The distinction between life and art is not always clear, but only a writer as deft as Kincaid can blur the lines so elegantly. Agent: The Wiley Agency.

December 1, 2012
A recursive and beguiling tale of a collapsing marriage by the veteran Kincaid (The Autobiography of My Mother, 1996, etc.). Early in this slim, challenging novel, Kincaid drops a reference to Gertrude Stein, whose repetitive rhythmic prose is a clear inspiration ("it was her presence in his life that kept him from being who he really was, who he really was, who he really was"). The plot centers on Mr. and Mrs. Sweet, a couple whose marriage is shot through with passivity and resentment, though the source of the tension is never quite explicit. To be sure, Mr. Sweet is a New York-bred pianist and composer who hates living in Vermont. (His opus-in-progress is called This Marriage Is Dead.) But Kincaid represents the struggle as something more than a typical case of domestic dysfunction. The family lives in the home of novelist and short story writer Shirley Jackson, who famously produced her modern gothic tales while raising four children, and Mrs. Sweet similarly labors to balance creativity and domesticity. Their two children are named Persephone and Heracles, and the story sometimes shifts into a broad allegorical mode that, like those names, echoes Greek mythology. (In one scene, Heracles pulls off his father's testicles and throws them all the way to the Atlantic.) In some ways, this book is a tribute to modernism, in its surrealism, in its Stein-ian prose and in the way Kincaid cannily merges past and present events to evoke mood; what cubist painters did with point of view, she does with past and present tense to suggest a persistent melancholy in the Sweet home. It's not a total success: Without the tether of a firm plot, all the time-folding makes the narrative feel static, an artful set of complaints. Yet Kincaid's audaciousness is winning. She's taken some much-needed whacks at the conventional domestic novel.

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April 15, 2012
Fans of Lannan Literary Award winner Kincaid have waited ten years for this novel, ostensibly a study of a family in small-town New England but really about how our minds work overtime to make sense of past, present, and future.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2012
A decade after her last novel, Mr. Potter (2002), Kincaid returns to fiction with a vengeance. Her urgent subject has always been her life in Antigua and America imaginatively and courageously transformed into a microcosm of the crimes, psychic pain, and social aberration unleashed in the fateful year of 1492. In this furious, funny, and sorrowful tirade and lament, Kincaid meshes autobiography with archetypes as the unraveling of an unlikely marriage turns into a heightened, hypnotic, and shrewdly complex inquiry into time, alienation, and metamorphosis. Mrs. Sweet, a wife, mother, gardener, and writer living in Vermont, loves and adores her children, no matter how much they baffle and exhaust her. Athletic Heracles surrounds himself with toy armies. Persephone is often hidden and out of reach. Kincaid's foray into myth is profound and unnervingly surreal as Mrs. Sweet is forced to recognize that small, brooding Mr. Sweet, a frustrated musician and composer, now hates her. The gathering storm of her rage, anguish, and regret propels her on a holy journey into her past and our collective history. Kincaid has created a measured, bewitching, and metaphysical fable, as well as a venomous, acidly comic, and plangent tale of love, betrayal, and loss that is at once slashingly personal and radiantly universal in its mystery, passion, and catharsis. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A national tour and publicity campaign will herald the publication of the first novel in 10 years by the distinctive, much-acclaimed, and fearless Kincaid.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)