Jamaica Kincaid Is Still Jewish

The author, publishing a new novel this week, talks about conversion, suffering, and life in Vermont

 “I need socks,” Jamaica Kincaid said, standing in the doorway of her clapboard Vermont home, barefoot and clutching her laptop. She went upstairs to fetch a pair and asked that I wait in her living room, which was cluttered in a cozy way, the walls filled with books and every surface covered with tchotchkes—menorahs and tropical-colored paintings and miniature brass sculptures. It was the kind of room that would make it difficult to leave the house. Beside the couch was a tall table with an array of crudely made ceramic artifacts—a pizza, a duck, and more than a dozen uneven baskets, as if a summer-camp bunk was waiting for their creations to dry.

Kincaid returned, still barefoot, but with a pair of Smart-Wool socks in hand. She wore black stretch pants and a pinto-bean-colored headscarf. “I was up all night long, working on a sentence,” she said. She hadn’t finished it yet.

Kincaid, a novelist and a former writer for The New Yorker, recently finished her first novel in 10 years, See Now Then, out this week. Kincaid bristles at the notion, implicit in the way the book is being marketed, that 10 years is an unusually long time to wait between books. She does not write every day and dislikes the notion of committing to a novel as one does a job. The desk in her office is strewn with papers in a manner suggesting that she doesn't spend very much time there. “If I had a book every year, I would keep it to myself,” she said. She says she still marvels at the fact that she’s a published author. When she moved to New York from Antigua in 1965 to work as an au pair for a family on Madison Avenue, she never expected to be able to publish a book, and certainly not 13 of them. “It’s harder now for an unconnected black woman like I was,” Kincaid said. She famously got her first assignment, for Ingenue magazine, by walking into their office from off the street and pitching an interview with Gloria Steinem. That opened the door to pieces for The New Yorker and The Village Voice and the parties and readings of New York’s literary scene, of which Kincaid was a fixture. It’s a time she remembers fondly, and hasn’t fully abandoned.

See Now Then is about the failing marriage between a writer and a composer living in a small New England village. The writer, Mrs. Sweet, is black and from the Caribbean, and her husband, Mr. Sweet, is white and comes from a princely faction of New York “entitled to doormen, no matter what.” The book’s premise appears to be borrowed from Kincaid’s own life: In 2002, her 20-year marriage to the composer Allen Shawn ended in divorce. Kincaid continues to live in the Bennington home they shared.

Continue reading.