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.
