At the Bottom of the River by Jamaica Kincaid (1983)

A short collection of 10 stories by the Antiguan writer.

Book Review: At the Bottom of the River is the fine spider-web that caught me, and Jamaica Kincaid is the one who spun the web. Kincaid is a deceptively simple writer. She writes: "My tears have been the result of my disappointments," and the reader says, "Ah, she's a simple soul." Then she says: "My disappointments stand up and grow ever taller." The reader says, "Hmm, that's interesting." Kincaid follows with: "Let me have them registered, like newly domesticated animals," and nothing is the same again. At the Bottom of the River  contains precious and delicate stories, without obvious plots. Instead the story is told between the lines: "Someone is making a girl a dress or a boy a shirt, someone is making her husband a soup with cassava so that he can take it to the cane field tomorrow, someone is sprinkling a colorless powder outside a closed door so that someone else's child will be stillborn." We're never told where the stories are set or who's telling them, and they're stronger for what we're not told, existing in some mural of a timeless, universal myth painted by brushes from her homeland. Kincaid doesn't push the reader, doesn't tell the reader what to think. Instead the reader develops all opinions herself, and the stories are more convincing for that. Each story edges into the mind and occupies it. Like an imperial power, Kincaid's writing colonizes her readers. Stealthily, unobtrusively. Like a happy husband, readers think we came up with these ideas on our own. "Girl" is her best-known story, and the other stories follow in similar pattern, except becoming more fantastic, with ghosts and dreams, a repeated desired, idealized, mothering lover. Biblical, Whitmanesque naming. An undercurrent of anger -- there's an edge: "I shall grow up to be a tall, graceful, and altogether beautiful woman, and I shall impose on large numbers of people my will and also, for my own amusement, great pain." She's a Caribbean Woolf, turning her life into a stream of consciousness mixture of indigenous folklore and her own creation myth, creating symbols for her life and her troubled relationship with her mother. As seven of the stories in At the Bottom of the River were previously published in The New Yorker and one in The Paris Review, the magazine format might work better, reading a new story every couple of months or so. The stories being too similar, there's repetition; the first half of At the Bottom of the River was better than the second. The dream-scapes, the myths, didn't hold up as well back to back, with their gauzy, plotless, river of impressions, feelings, memories, and fanciful imagery. Even in such a short book, the stories began to lose their strength. A more realist story or two wouldn't've hurt.  [3½★]