Time rules in jamaica kincaid's new novel, 'see now then'

Author Jamaica Kincaid is out with a new novel, her first in 10 years. Kincaid is perhaps best known for her books _At the Bottom of the River_ and _The Autobiography of My Mother. _Her new

book, _See Now Then_, tackles some difficult themes. The novel opens with a scene of a seemingly idyllic home life in small-town New England. But it is soon clear the marriage of Mr. and

Mrs. Sweet is anything but sweet. Critics have drawn parallels to Kincaid's own life. Mrs. Sweet, like Kincaid, is an avid gardener; her marriage to a composer ends in divorce. But

Kincaid says critics who classify the novel as a masked autobiography are diminishing the work. "Why does it matter?" she asks Celeste Headlee, host of weekends on _All Things

Considered_. She adds: "It's painful, in its way, to be dismissed because, 'Well, it's about her marriage and revenge or something.' It's not that at all."

_See Now Then_ traces the painful unraveling of the Sweets' marriage in an unusual narrative that bucks the traditional style. ------------------------- INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS ON THE

BOOK'S NARRATIVE: "It's not a book in the usual way of and then and then and next. It doesn't have what you'd call a traditional structure or a traditional

narrative. But it's very structured, it's very mannered, actually, in the way your mind might work. I mean, I've come to think that the traditional way of writing is the

artificial way that that's not the way things work at all. It's not the way thinking works." ON THE CHARACTER OF TIME: "Time is the main character. Time is the element

that controls the consciousness, the very being of the people. I started out thinking, 'What is this thing we call time?' And it started in this way: Every day I see a photograph

of myself taken when I was 2 years of age. And I would look at it and wonder, 'Well, what happened to that 2-year-old, where did it go?' ... And so it's from that really I

began to contemplate all the things that had happened." ON DRAWING FROM HER OWN LIFE IN THE NOVEL: "My own everyday life was not on my mind so much, but how to render something

that had happened. How to make sense of it. You know, men write about their life all the time. You know, Norman Mailer would put himself in his books, and no one made it seem that he was

doing something less. ... If I had looked different, my autobiography in the book, or any kind of autobiography in the book, would not be held against it. ... Sometimes I feel that there is

a certain kind of book that I should have written, that is expected of someone like me: the travails of the black woman ... (The book is) not about the black woman, or the black this,

it's about a human experience." Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.