Whatever happened to Annie John?

Fictional autobiography is a tricky genre.  To even have a hope of seeming realistic, the narrator can neither be omniscient nor completely linear in story-telling.  Memory is a fickle beast, and a narrator with too much memory lacks realism.  But, also to be realistic, it helps is the narrator does not have total self-awareness.  We are all the victims of motives and thoughts not conjured up in either our conscious minds or our memories; we are all subject to revisionist history of our actions.  To write a fictional autobiography, then, is to suggest just enough—if the autobiography has no suggestions of what is hidden from the narrator, it will not be believable, but if it leaves too much hidden, then the story will not cohere.

Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John is a mixed bag.  First, the prose is quite good; the book is a literary pleasure to read.  But, as a story?  An odd problem.  If we take the story at face value, it is the reminisces of an adult about her childhood in Antigua.  A bildungsroman, and in many ways a terribly conventional one.  The setting is a Caribbean island, and there is much about the atmosphere of the book which clings to that setting, but the basic storyline could be anywhere at any time.  Taken at face value, the story is really just not all that interesting.  But, clearly we aren’t meant to take the story at face value.  Our heroine starts off when she is young describing a very close relationship with her mother, and by the end of adolescence she has developed a deep antagonism toward her mother.  So far, so conventional.  But, the cause of this transformation is left totally unexplained in this novel.  Over time, her mother moves from Saint to Villain, and yet there is nothing explaining why.  Are we just supposed to think this is the natural process of aging?  That seems a bit farfetched.  Are there things about the mother and daughter left unsaid?  Almost certainly.  There are hints littered throughout, but what are hints and what are extraneous details?  No way to tell.  And therein lies the problem.  This is a work of fiction: there is no true person underneath this narrative.  So, how are we to construct the true person?  Before engaging on some hunt for clues to a mystery, it would seem to be necessary that there is a solution in order to make the quest worthwhile.  If there is not solution, then with what are we left?  A mystery story which ends in such a manner that no matter who you think did it, you might be right.

So, is the book worth reading?  A curious question.  Compare it to Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One which I recently reread.  (And, I bet that is the first time anyone compared these two books.)  The Miller story is also a bildungsroman; the coming of age of Bruce Wayne and how he turns into Batman.  There are hints of a deep psychological need to become Batman, born of childhood trauma.  We can speculate about what is left unsaid, we can form a psychological profile of our hero.  The format is different, the plots are not much alike, but there is a genre similarity in the stories of Bruce Wayne and Annie John.  Which story has more description of character?  No doubt about it: Annie John.  But, that is partly the product of the relative lengths of the two stories and that Miller’s book is not simply telling the story of the birth of Batman, but the development of Jim Gordon and Selina Kyle as well.  As literature, if you are willing to accept that writing a comic book requires a literary skill, then they are both quite good.  (Those who habitually disparage the comic book will find that comparison ludicrous.)

There is one huge distinction between these two book, however.  By the end of Miller’s book, I am interested in Bruce Wayne’s psychology.  He rises above the pages to become a person about whom it is worth thinking.  (In fact, Christopher Nolan made a trilogy of movies in which Bruce Wayne is the character we find in Miller’s book.)  By the end of Annie John’s story, on the other hand, I have lost all interest.  There is simply too much left undefined in Kincaid’s novel.  At the half-way point, I had high hopes for Annie John, but by the end, I no longer cared about our heroine; yes, there might be an interesting backstory to her somewhere, but without constructing one myself, she ends up looking a bit, well, comic-bookish.  Annie John would fit in well in the Dark Days of the Avengers (two dimensional characters with an inadequate backstory to make you care if they stay or leave).  Annie John sails off to England at the end of the novel, and I genuinely have no interest in her; which, I must say is a rather sad fate for a character I grew to like when she was young.