Taking a cue from her own The Autobiography of My Mother, Jamaica Kincaid's See Now Then might better have been entitled My Autobiography. Deeply rooted in Kincaid's quarter-century marriage to composer Allen Shawn, the novel is a chilling portrait of a failed relationship that, in the disdain it displays for an ex-spouse, brings to mind Philip Roth's takedown of Claire Bloom as the fictional Eve Frame in I Married a Communist.
Mr. and Mrs. Sweet and their children, "the beautiful Persephone and the young Heracles," as they're described throughout the novel, live in a small Vermont village ("in the Shirley Jackson house"). From the opening pages we learn that Mrs. Sweet's husband, "the dear Mr. Sweet, hated her very much," comparing her appearance to "Charles Laughton as he portrayed Captain Bligh" and composing a nocturne called This Marriage Is Dead. It's thus no surprise that at the climax of this brief novel, Mr. Sweet declares, "I love someone else and I will not give her up." In Mrs. Sweet's telling, her agoraphobic spouse is a "rodent" who "had not grown a half inch since he turned twelve," and she plainly intends that to serve as much more than a bit of physical description. She takes refuge in her writing and her gardening, striving against seemingly insurmountable odds to preserve something resembling a normal family life.
What appeal See Now Then possesses doesn't lie in its depiction of the Sweets' ugly, claustrophobic relationship (James Salter's Light Years is a much more compelling and emotionally engaging portrait of a marriage's decay.) Instead, as its title suggests, it's best read as an extended reflection on the passage of time and the insistent tug of memory. Kincaid repeatedly teases out the ways "now" and "then" merge in the mind, "as if the past only becomes past when you render it Now." The novel's long, looping sentences have a rhythmic, almost hypnotic, character, their images often arresting, as in the way Mrs. Sweet describes how she has been "unraveling various parts of the garment that had been her own life" or Mr. Sweet's claim that his wife is "like walking into barbed wire in the dark."
Despite its grim subject matter and raw, stream-of-consciousness style, See Now Then does have moments of beauty and pathos. It's most definitely not a novel for the casual or impatient, and those who've encountered and appreciated Kincaid's work will want to read it. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In a heavily autobiographical novel, Jamaica Kincaid portrays the demise of a long-term marriage.