See Now Then (Kincaid)

See Now Then
Jamaica Kincaid, 2013
Farrar, Straus and Girox
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374180560


Summary
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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Aka—Elaine Potter Richardson
• Birth—May 25, 1949
• Where—St. John's, Antigua
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Center for Fiction's Clifton Fadiman Medal;
   Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, Prix Femina Etranger;
   Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest
   Award
• Currently—lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and
   Claremont California.


Jamaica Kincaid, Caribbean novelist, gardener, and gardening writer, is the author of six novels, including her most recent, So Then Now (2013)

She was born in the city of St. John's on the island of Antigua, which she left at age seventeen for the U.S. After working as an au pair in Manhattan, she fell in with a group of writers for The New Yorker where she began writing the magazine's "Talk of the Town" column. Then-editor William Shawn started publishing her fiction in the late 1970s, and in 1979 she married his son Allen (a composer and the brother of actor Wallace).

Kincaid's short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, where her novel Lucy was originally serialized. Her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

Her novels are loosely autobiographical, though Kincaid has warned against interpreting their autobiographical elements too literally: "Everything I say is true, and everything I say is not true. You couldn't admit any of it to a court of law. It would not be good evidence. Her work often prioritizes "impressions and feelings over plot development" and often features conflict with both a strong maternal figure and colonial and neocolonial influences.

Kincaid's marriage to Allen Shawn ended in 2002. They have two grown children, Harold (music producer/songwriter), and a daughter, Annie (singer/songwriter Annie Rosamond). Kincaid lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year.(Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Ms. Kincaid writes with passion and conviction, and she also writes with a musical sense of language, a poet’s understanding of how politics and history, private and public events, overlap and blur.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


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 - New York Newsday


Man marries. Woman grows old and fat. Man throws her over for a prettier version. It's a familiar story. Yet, in Jamaica Kincaid's voice, the scorned woman's fury becomes a spellbinding tale, as lyrical as Paradise Lost, as resonant as a Greek epic. This is hell like none other. You descend it circle by circle, and, word by word, you yield to the storyteller's art.... Kincaid is not easy reading. Not much that is worthwhile in literature is. But she is fierce and true. Certainly, that is so of See Now Then. After 10 years of inexplicable fictional silence, she comes forth with a mighty roar.
Marie Arana - Washington Post


Kincaid conscientiously and expertly manipulates language the way a photographer adjusts a camera’s lens, bringing her characters into clear focus and accentuating their profiles against their natural backdrop.
Liza Weisstuch - Boston Sunday Globe

 
Bold and beautiful.... Joycean? Yes, and also much like the role of Winnie in the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days—both Winnie and Kincaid addressing us in a rush that we recognize as an actual process of thought.... See Now Then is—by turns—lovely, even lilting, difficult, and condemning of Mr. Sweet. The good news is that everything works—Kincaid’s style, story and startling way of telling a tale of the cosmos in terms of domesticity . . . There is courage and brilliance here, and an unusual way of going about it. We hurt for Mrs. Sweet, we pull for her, we identify with her passion for her children while we somewhat understand Mr. Sweet – and fairly jump for joy when Mrs. Sweet notes that, "Death has no Then and Now."
Karen Brady - Buffalo News


Chaucer’s Wife of Bath meets Virginia Woolf!.... With the intensity of Virginia Woolf, Kincaid creates a palimpsest of time past, time present and time future . . . Mrs. Sweet in these pages makes a verbal symphony.... Kincaid’s attempt to capture living itself may just be, as she puts it, "always just out of reach," but her talent for trying remains palpable on every page.... Connoisseurs will find it delicious.
Alan Cheuse - Chicago Tribune (Book of the Month)

 
Damned, haunted and psychological.... Kincaid’s heady fiction doesn’t unfold dramatically, but her prose does, vining and clinging to readers’ ears, blooming into a tritone musical theory—see-now-then.... Churning through the tenses, Mrs. Sweet’s stream of consciousness is the narrative form: an aesthetic rendering of how time, memory and imagination create the fabric of being... In her earlier novels, misaligned family relations produce the potential for human failure. Kincaid’s female protagonist-narrators triumph against those circumstances through literary intelligence. Mrs. Sweet’s grappling with time is beautiful and brutal: It acknowledges that our failures sometimes deny surmounting and, instead, resonate across memory into persistent, heart-rending permanence.
Walton Muyumba - Dallas Morning News


Kincaid continues to write with a unique, compelling voice that cannot be found anywhere else. Her small books are worth a pile of thicker—and hollower—ones
Jeffrey Rodgers - San Francisco Chronicle

 
See Now Then is a hurricane of a book, a novel of psychic bewilderment and seething inaction that relentlessly defines and redefines the sense of otherness and displacement that is the permanent legacy of slavery and colonialism. An existential crisis if there ever was one, Jamaica Kincaid mines it with seriousness, tenderness and frequently savage humor in this novel, showing that it touches not just blacks, but all people, however loathe they may be to admit it. But See Now Then gives us no choice. From the first pages, its intimate, matter of fact, stream of consciousness style blurs the lines between us and them, now and then, poetry and prose, reality and imagination.... With Kincaid, it’s never a matter of what wins, only of what is.
Ms. Magazine


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. What’s startling is the presumably autobiographical nature of the plot.....  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.
Publishers Weekly


Fans of Lannan Literary Award winner Kincaid have waited more than ten years for this novel, originally scheduled for September 2012, ostensibly about a small-town New England family but really about the characters' minds.
Library Journal


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.... 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 [Gertrude] Stein-ian prose and in the way Kincaid cannily merges past and present events to evoke mood... It's not a total success.... Yet Kincaid's audaciousness is winning. She's taken some much-needed whacks at the conventional domestic novel.
Kirkus Reviews

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