Mr. Potter: A Novel [Hardcover]

Jamaica Kincaid (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 9, 2002

A great writer's lush, panoramic new novel: the story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home.

Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate taxi chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen and the graveyard where he will be buried. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.

Misery infects the unstudied, slow pace of this island and of Mr. Potter's days. As Kincaid's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, crippled community. Kincaid strings together a moving picture of Mr. Potter's ancestors -- beginning with memories of his father, a poor fisherman, and his mother, who committed suicide -- and the outside world that presses in on his life, in the form of his Lebanese employer and, later, a couple fleeing World War II. Within these surroundings, Mr. Potter struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, to shake off the encumbrance of his daughters -- one of whom will return to Antigua after he dies, and will tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.

In Mr. Potter, her most luminous, ambitious work to date, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unexamined life.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The refrain of Jamaica Kincaid's clear-sighted, poetic novel Mr. Potter is that reading and writing are incomparable prizes: it is literacy that separates us--not without pain--from the natural world. Kincaid's title character, a chauffeur, spends his life in the bright, unchanging sun of Antigua. Each day his father fruitlessly lowers his fishing pots and his net into the waters of the surrounding ocean, finally cursing God for his bad luck. These are ordinary men, as trapped and elevated by circumstance as any of us, except that without the split in consciousness that reading gives, they cannot see any context for what happens to them. Only the writer--and in this case the narrator, Mr. Potter's grown daughter, a true lover of words--can provide context for such characters, dipping back into history, stepping close to read the men's thoughts, drawing further away to take in politics and social movements. Kincaid's looping, deceptively simple style draws on the work of female modernists like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein to stitch together the story of Mr. Potter. After a few stiff paragraphs at the opening, the effect is spellbinding. Readers familiar with Kincaid will recognize her preoccupation with family (as seen in My Brother) and her unsentimental assertion that in a world dominated by practical concerns, blood connections matter, even if love does not always follow the bloodline. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Kincaid follows up My Brother and Autobiography of My Mother with another unsentimental, unsparing meditation on family and the larger forces that shape an individual's world. The novel follows the life of one man, Mr. Potter, from his birth to his death (not necessarily in that order) on the Caribbean island of Antigua. Mr. Potter, a native Antiguan of African descent, works as a chauffeur for a Mideastern immigrant and then for himself. His world is full of displaced persons a client who is a Holocaust refugee, a lover from the island of Dominica but Mr. Potter gives no thought to his own displacement or the events in the wider world that have brought these people together. In fact, he doesn't think about very much besides securing creature comforts; at the book's opening, he is unreflective and unselfconscious "between him and all that he saw there was no distance of any kind." But what seems like a conventional narrative about a man's coming to consciousness becomes something quite different as the reader gradually gets to know the book's narrator, one of Mr. Potter's many illegitimate daughters, who slowly reveals her relationship to her father and whose voice comes to dominate the story. As in her previous books, Kincaid has exquisite control over her narrator's deep-seated rage, which drives the story but never overpowers it and is tempered by a clear-eyed sympathy. Her prose here is more incantatory and hypnotic than ever, with repeating phrases ("And that day, the sun was in its usual place, up above and in the middle of the sky, and it shone in its usual way, so harshly bright...") that can occasionally seem mannered. This, however, is a relatively rare occurrence in an otherwise taut and often spellbinding novel.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374214948
• ISBN-13: 978-0374214944
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,205,692 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jamaica Kincaid's works include, Mr Potter, The Autobiography of My Mother, and My Brother, a memoir. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very tentative rating - Kincaid had me in her hands, June 1, 2002

By 

M. J. Smith (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mr. Potter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Mr. Potter is written in the same style of language circling as her Autobiography of My Mother. When I had read about 20 pages, I had to start over to determine if I had missed a transition in the storyline or if the author had omitted the transition - the latter being the correct answer. In Mr. Potter the circular language almost demands that you read out loud - or at least form the words in your mind - if you are to follow the story. In that sense, I did not enjoy reading this book as I had her earlier works.

However, by the end of the book I had to be in awe of the author. She succeeded in presenting both the despair and the wisdom of being inconsequential. She accurately presented individuals as being shaped by small details such as a line drawn through the father section of a birth certificate. She presented the similarity in displacement whether a rich Lebanonese businessman, a Vienese doctor, or an African slave. Through that similarity of displacement, she made a strong social statement about the relationship of the "have's" and the "have not's".

The story line is simple - a boy is born without his father claiming him, his mother leaves him as a servant boy while she commits suicide, he learns to drive, he becomes a chauffeur, he has many daughters - one of which is the narrator, he becomes a successful cabbie, he dies. However, through this simple story, through language that is simple and difficult simultaneously, Kincaid crafted a realistic, wise, critical depiction of humanity. I'm impressed.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Brilliant, September 30, 2002

By 

Taryn A. B. (Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Potter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Kincaid's writing style is entirely unique and distinctive. This book is not just trying to tell a story, it is assigning an identity to people who otherwise would not have one. The point of this book is to explore and interpret the influence that the past has on the present, both globally and individually. Every literary device Kincaid incorporates into this book is used for a reason, from her repetition of certain phrases to her two page long sentences--it all adds and supports the depth and breadth of the subject she is writing about. With this book Kincaid not only challenges the way we view our lives, history and environment, but the way we view the lives,history and environments of people who are wholly unlike us. "Mr. Potter" is a striking piece of literature.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle, nuanced, lyrical, passionate, and literary, May 22, 2002

By 

Jana Braziel (Holmen, WI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mr. Potter: A Novel (Hardcover)

Jamaica Kincaid's most recent novel MR. POTTER (2002) is the author's most recent foray into the complex and challenging terrain of autofiction. The novel is subtle, nuanced, lyrical, passionate, and literary. For those who know Kincaid's work well and are committed to the ardor that reading her texts demands, it is not only an immensely rewarding read, but a new and unexpected episode in a literary drama that continues (thankfully!) to unfold with breathtaking poetry and philosophical brilliance.