Kincaid has never asked for sympathy-not since 1988 when she wrote her wonderful furnace-blast about the miserable state of her native Antigua, “A Small Place.” By then, her rage about colonialism had come to a head, and she’d left behind the relative quaintness of her first novel, “Annie John.” But Kineaid is too enamored of her characters’ hard hearts. Xuela’s so unlikable and remote you feel as if you’re looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope. And Kineaid’s prose here seems arty for art’s sake. Are you ready for a sentence with a colon, two dashes, five semicolons and 26 commas? There are gorgeous moments when Kincaid taps out words like notes on a piano: “I loved the face of a gray sky, porous, grainy, wet, following me to school for mornings on end, sending down on me soft arrows of water.” Even then, you wish she’d played a different tune.
