SOURCE: “Don't Worry, Be Happy,” in The Nation, February 18, 1991, pp. 207–09.

In the following review of Lucy, Als discusses Kincaid's bitter depiction of Caribbean colonialism and racism in Lucy and A Small Place, noting their effect on shattering the popular myth of tropical paradise.

With the publication of her short-story collection At the Bottom of the River in 1984, Jamaica Kincaid became our premier monologuist about the Caribbean. Focusing on her native Antigua, she wrested from it a variety of tales whose locus was dispossession: the emigrant who abandons the familiar in favor of self-invention in the new.

The means Kincaid has employed to examine this theme—fiction and the essay—have prompted two critical reactions. For works like River and the first-person coming-of-age novel Annie John (1985), she has been lauded as a “poet of the particular” whose eye for the minutiae of daily life in Antigua was remarked on...