SEE NOW THEN More Reviews

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USA TODAY

By Elysa Gardner, USA TODAY

Published: February 13, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘See Now Then’ is one quirky read

"Like Kincaid's ex-husband, Allen Shawn, Mr. Sweet is a composer. They live in a small New England town, as Shawn and Kincaid did, and have a son and daughter, as the former couple do. But Kincaid's first book in nearly a decade is not a barely fictionalized memoir, or so the author has insisted. As she recently told a reporter, her real children are not, like the Sweet kids, named Heracles and Persephone, and 'my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.'

Such coyness is pervasive in See Now Then — though so is bawdy humor and unabashed rage and sorrow. There are passages that are almost unbearably self-pitying, with Kincaid — um, that is, Mrs. Sweet — lamenting her husband's disdain for her Caribbean heritage and no-longer-youthful figure. We learn, too, of the 'turbulence and upheaval' she has endured from childhood on: 'I seemed unable to do anything that pleased anyone and that included me,' she writes toward the end."


LOS ANGELES TIMES

By Hector Tobar, Los Angeles Times

Published: February 1, 2013

Jamaica Kincaid scrolls through time in 'See Now Then'

  

 "As fictional characters, the Sweets live in the protective bubble of art: We are moved by their experiences but don't feel the cringe that comes from seeing real people hurt themselves. But there are enough parallels to the real Kincaid's life — Mrs. Sweet gardens, and Kincaid has written and edited several books on the topic — that reading "See Now Then" can feel uncomfortably voyeuristic."

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

By DWIGHT GARNER,The New York Tmes

Published: February 12, 2013

The Marriage Has Ended; Revenge Begins

 ‘See Now Then,’ Jamaica Kincaid’s New Novel 

"When Dorothy Parker drank too much, Gore Vidal once reported, she sometimes suffered from what she ruefully called “the frankies”: the inclination to tell people, as if for their own good, what she really thought of them.

There’s something about the men of the Shawn family — William, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, who died in 1992, and now his son, Allen, a composer — that seems to give women the frankies while sober. 

In 1998 Lillian Ross published “Here but Not Here,” a memoir of her 40-year affair with the married William Shawn. She outed this famously private man, while his wife was still living, as an enthusiast for pornography who “longed for the earthiest and wildest kinds of sexual adventures,” among many other things."

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Polly Rosenwaike

Friday, February 8, 2013 

'See Now Then,' by Jamaica Kincaid

"If we're tempted to see the tall, Caribbean-born, garden-loving, synagogue-going Mrs. Sweet - scribbling away at her desk in Vermont - as a stand-in (a sugar substitute?) for the author, Kincaid seems to be egging us on.

 

One can't help thinking that Kincaid's easily Googleable ex-husband will not be pleased by the arrival of "See Now Then." How should the rest of us feel? Exhilarated, grateful - and relieved, perhaps, that Kincaid can't see inside our own heads."