Adding Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy to a very short list of texts that are among the best things ever written and happen to be about the author’s mother

The author is also the narrator in all these books, though lightly fictionalized in Lucy

A year ago I wrote a Goodreads review of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke that ended with this:

It also strikes me that I should add this book to a short list of books or writings which are among the best things ever written and happen to be (to varying degrees) about the author’s mother:

1. The Glass Essay by Anne Carson
2. Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
3. Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
4. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke

I now have another to add to this list:

5. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

I was thinking of this because I just started Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana, and I was reflecting that “One Brief, Scuzzy Moment,” by him, republished by NY Mag shortly after he died, was probably the best piece of prose I’ve read in the past year, maybe the last few years. But the best thing I’ve read overall in the past year is Lucy.

I read Lucy a couple weeks ago. It’s a short novel, and by the time I was about 30 pages in I was telling people it was “hard to think of a book I think is better.” It was published in 1990, and after finishing it I learned each of the 5 chapters were originally published in the New Yorker, serially, and that Kincaid’s husband during this time was Allen Shawn, brother of Wallace (himself the husband of Deborah Eisenberg), and son of William Shawn, extremely influential and opinionated editor of the New Yorker through 4 decades, 1952-1987. Maybe it doesn’t matter who her husband was, but I imagine Allen was possibly a useful first reader. In any case, imagine the level of attention a book whose every chapter was published in the New Yorker individually would have gotten.

This question of “thinking of a book that is better” has caused me to go back in my mind through the best books I’ve read in the past ~5 years, which would be The Idiot by Elif Batuman, Luster by Raven Leilani, Normal People by Sally Rooney, Early Work by Andrew Martin, maybe Elementary Particles by Houllebecq, possibly Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and also, for sure, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams—the book that caused me to make the above list. All of these are incredible achievements, and to some extent it’s silly to compare them, but doing so helps me think about what I actually value from a book.

I think ultimately I think Normal People is the best book of all the ones just mentioned, but only because romantic relationships are, to me, the most important thing in life, and Normal People focuses on one extremely important, self-shaping relationship to the exclusion of all else, and so it’s hard to compete with someone focusing that hard on the most important thing. Also, the characters and their milieu and values — everyone’s vaguely left-liberal but mostly cares about writing — felt exactly like the context in which most of my important relationships played out, and so I kind of felt like the book was literally about me.

But there’s also something important about life not captured by Normal People, which is relationships with family members, perhaps especially if those relationships have been ‘problematized’. It’s here that the next-best rung of my favorites shine, and this includes A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and Lucy (and the rest of the books on my list of 5 at the top). Between these two, scalar comparison kind of breaks down. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is an incredible text, but (and?), like The Glass Essay, it’s shorter than 80 pages, but (and?) those pages are just pure concentrated expression of a single feeling. Sorrow and Glass are like bullets to your brain, or an extremely strong hallucinogenic drug that fully takes you to another world, you literally cannot see out your own eyes, and then, 10 minutes later, it wears off and you’re back in reality. What is the value of that? It feels intense, but it can be slippery to evaluate aesthetically.

Lucy, on the other hand, is a novel. It has a plot. It has secondary and tertiary characters. They all have arcs. But it’s doing a very similar thing as Sorrow and Glass (and Fierce Attachments and Are You My Mother?). The most important relationship in the book is that between the protagonist, Lucy, and her mother, who exists only in flashbacks and anecdotes. Lucy is a 19-year-old girl from the West Indies who gets a job as an au pair for a rich family in an unnamed city that is New York. The book covers a year of this life, wherein Lucy meets an Irish girl her age who she becomes friends with, has at least two mostly emotionless flings with handsome and/or charismatic guys, and gets to know very well the white family whose four mostly-sweet daughters she cares for, especially the mother of the family, who could not be more different from Lucy (or Lucy’s mother), and who serves as the primary engine for Lucy’s self-discovery. Lucy learns that even rich white women can feel sad, and (but?) to her mind, they can be shockingly naive about men. Where Lucy comes from, women outright try to murder their sexual rivals, if only with obeah, a kind of magic. But the main target of Lucy’s introspective investigations is her own mother, and specifically, the inextricably connected and inexhaustibly complex link between her love and her hate for the woman who raised her (which, incidentally, is pretty much exactly the theme of Fierce Attachments). Here is a representative passage:

As each day unfolded before me, I could see the sameness in everything; I could see the present take a shape—the shape of my past.

My past was my mother; I could hear her voice, and she spoke to me not in English or the French patois that she sometimes spoke, or in any language that needed help from the tongue; she spoke to me in language anyone female could understand. And I was undeniably that—female. Oh, it was a laugh, for I had spent so much time saying I did not want to be like my mother that I missed the whole story: I was not like my mother—I was my mother. And I could see now why, to the few feeble attempts I made to draw a line between us, her reply always was “You can run away, but you cannot escape the fact that I am your mother, my blood runs in you, I carried you for nine months inside me.” How else was I to take such a statement but as a sentence for life in a prison whose bars were stronger than any iron imaginable? I had, at that very moment, a collection of letters from her in my room, nineteen in all, one for every year of my life, unopened. I thought of opening the letters, not to read them but to burn them at the four corners and send them back to her unread. It was an act, I had read somewhere, of one lover rejecting another, but I could not trust myself to go too near them. I knew that if I read only one, I would die from longing for her.

Incidentally, the restraint to not italicize the “was” in “I was my mother” there is kind of mind-blowing to me. That’s that New Yorker line-editing jumping out. There’s a whole philosophy of orthography embedded in that decision, founded on a very deep trust in the reader, that is only one of a million prose decisions in these 164 pages that goes toward making this deceptively simple novel one of the best piecing of writing I’ve ever read.

Anyway, I recommend Lucy. I also have two copies now, so if you want one you should hit me up.