My Brother

Compassion only occasionally lightens the grim tone of Jamaica Kincaid's searing account of her younger brother Devon's 1996 death from AIDS. As in novels such as Annie John, Kincaid is ruthlessly honest about her ambivalence toward the impoverished Caribbean nation from which she fled, her restrictive family, and the culture that imprisoned Devon. That honesty, which includes chilling detachment from her brother's suffering, is sometimes alienating. But art has its own justifications. The bitter clarity of Kincaid's prose and the tangled, undeniably human feelings it lucidly dissects are justification enough.