SHARPER THAN A SERPENT'S PEN

By John Skow

PUZZLING OVER WHY Jamaica Kincaid gave the title she did to the novel she wrote, The Autobiography of My Mother (Farrar Straus Giroux; 228 pages; $20), is one of the season's better literary games. The book's striking central figure, apparently a fictional portrait of Kincaid's mother, aborts her only pregnancy at age 15 and is in fact childless--making a logical contradiction of the title. The reward here, as always with Kincaid's work, is the reading of her clear, bitter prose.

Kincaid is the most personal of writers, and by now most readers will follow the particulars of a new novel from her with one eye on what they know of her unlikely history: a West Indian black, raised on Antigua, who--deep breath here--left home at 17 to escape a turbulent relationship with her mother, went to New York, dyed her hair blond in a brief punk phase, fell in with literary types at the New Yorker and became one of its star writers (though she has recently severed her ties with the magazine and publically criticized editor Tina Brown).

There is a cutting, angry quality to almost everything Kincaid has written, some recent, eerily serene essays on gardening excepted. Her primal theme, repeated well past the point of obsession, has been her abiding resentment of her mother. A remarkable short-story collection, At the Bottom of the River, and two autobiographical novels, Annie John and Lucy, have not been enough to wash her feelings out to sea, and she restates them again in Autobiography. Anyone who imagines that tensions between husband and wife exceed those between parent and child is not paying attention to Jamaica Kincaid.

Yet the first sentence of this fine, brooding novel expresses not hate but loss: "My mother died at the moment I was born, and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind." The narrator and title figure is Xuela Claudette Richardson, 70, a native of Dominica, by ancestry a mix of Carib, African and Scot, by emotional makeup surely part Kincaid. Since she has no mother (her father is dutiful but distant; in any case men are minor planets in the author's cosmology), she reinvents herself--as did Kincaid--and makes her way in the world by allying with various men, eventually marrying a decent, not very energetic white doctor, "a man trained to heal the sick, and in this he would succeed from time to time."

This strong old woman is an ironist. But irony is a pose, even for the strong, and in the end her solitude is achingly distilled: "Against ample evidence ... you put trust in the constancy of things ... One day you open your door, you step out in your yard, but the ground is not there and you fall into a hole that has no bottom and no sides and no color. The mystery of the hole in the ground gives way to the mystery of your fall; just when you get used to falling and falling forever, you stop; and that stopping is yet another mystery ..."

--By John Skow