HAUNTING TALE OF A HAVE-NOT - WHO HAS NEITHER LOVE NOR SOLACE.

Byline: Mary Ann Horne Orlando Sentinel 

Among the things many "haves" possess is the feeling that they understand the problems of "have-nots."

But Xuela Claudette Richardson, the heroine of Jamaica Kincaid's new novel, steals away that complacency and tells the "haves" of the world a thing or two about doing without.

Xuela, you could argue, is pretty much the quintessential have-not. Among the things she has not are a mother, a permanent home, her father's care.

She is able to cope reasonably well with her shortage of material goods, even the instability in her life, which begins the moment she is born.

She is hard and self-centered in many ways, but not self-pitying. She is not particularly likable and not at all sentimental.

A remarkably complex person, Xuela narrates her story in a voice that is at once blunt and poetic. She draws on the large themes of love, racism and betrayal but tells her story through the motions of everyday living.

The big have-not for Xuela is love; it is a commodity denied her as a child and one she denies herself as a woman. This leads her to reflect near the end of Kincaid's "The Autobiography of My Mother":

"I believe my entire life was without such a thing, love, the kind of love you die from or the kind of love that causes you to live eternally ... "

Kincaid's fifth novel, set on the island of Dominica, is really Xuela's autobiography. But as she tells her story, she struggles to fill in the gaps left by her mother's death giving birth to her.

"This account of my life has been an account of my mother's life as much as it has been an account of mine, and even so, again it is an account of the life of the children I did not have, as it is their account of me. In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from," she writes.

Not only does Xuela start life without a mother, but she also is virtually abandoned by her father. He leaves her in the care of a laundry woman and provides only money for her schooling.

Her education serves to set Xuela more apart from her surroundings. It fuels her contempt for people and things around her - especially those closest to her, such as her father, his second wife and children, the couple she lives with in a nearby village and the wives of an assortment of her married lovers.

Kincaid's prose is hypnotic with an almost scary sense of time and place. She sketches the lush West Indies with spare sentences that repeat key phrases like a drum beat or a birdcall until the reader is almost chanting them.

Xuela admits to an obsessive self-love, inspired perhaps by a desperate need for affection, but this love doesn't lead to happiness - or even self-knowledge.

Although Xuela illuminates many issues of love and life, she admits philosophically at the end of the book that she has never cracked the code of her own existence, despite a lifelong search:

"One day you open your door, you step out in your yard, but the ground is not there and you fall into a hole that has no bottom and no sides and no color. The mystery of the hole in the ground gives way to the mystery of your fall; just when you get used to falling and falling forever, you stop; and that stopping is yet another mystery ... there is no answer to that any more than there is an answer to why you fell in the first place. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. And why not, why not!"

Title: "The Autobiography of My Mother"

Author: Jamaica Kincaid 

Data: 240 pages, Strauss & Giroux; $20

Our rating: four stars

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO

Jamaica Kincaid writes spare - almost hypnotic - prose in "The Autobiography of My Mother," her novel about abandonment and emotional deprivation.