FAMILY TIES

By John Skow

Jamaica Kincaid is a writer of stinging force, rare intelligence and, alas, a single, anguished theme: her bitter resentment of her mother--who, as the author herself seems to realize, was merely a limited, self-absorbed woman. But in book after book (notably a brilliant, tormented novel, The Autobiography of My Mother), Kincaid displays the wounds of her unhappy childhood as a poor, bookish black girl in Antigua. Her new volume, an irritating navel contemplation titled My Brother (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 198 pages; $19), repeats the pattern of familiar, well-written complaint. (Opinions differ; in what appears to be a makeup call for earlier, fresher books overlooked, My Brother has been nominated for a National Book Award.)

What is off-putting about My Brother is that it is only glancingly a portrait of her younger half brother Devon Drew, who died of AIDS two years ago in Antigua. Its real subject is Kincaid's scalded psyche: how she felt about Devon's life (contemptuous at its waste--he was a charming, irresponsible, sexually profligate layabout); about his death (torn but loyal--she bought AZT in the U.S., and the drug gave him a remission); and about Antigua (bitter). The underlying, overflowing theme, as always, is anger.

There is deep, honest feeling here. It seems unbearably sad, for instance, that Kincaid, having remade herself as a writer of literary English, has almost forgotten the island patois that is her brother's only language. But her account is soaked in stale emotion, and it seems long past time for this gifted writer to tell us something new.

--By John Skow