My Brother.

There are no happy families. However close siblings become, the relationship between mother and father and children is never not complicated by the fact that in the presence of mother and father, children, even as adults, are children, and no parent can really ever understand the lives their children lead. It may appear that there is understanding but soon, again, some resonating blankness, some quotidian abyss, opens up like a rapacious mouth. What words would the mouth say? Figuring out what love is is difficult enough without the complications that the concept of family - mother, father, brother, sister, all of whom are also sons and daughters - introduces. In her extraordinary new work, Jamaica Kincaid negotiates the familial minefield: "I love the people I am from and I do not love the people I am from, and I do not really know what it means to say so, only that such a thing as no love now and much love now, these feelings are not permanent, or possibly not permanent. One day something may happen and I will understand that all the things I now feel, which do not at all seem like love (the word I would use to describe my feelings about my family, the people I have made my own: my husband, my children, my friends, though that word 'friend' is so thin to explain that thickness), are in fact love; that I loved my brother and the other people I am from, my mother, my other brothers, and Mr. Drew (the father of my brothers, who was a father to me, though at the same time not my father at all)."

She tells some parts of the tale of how she became herself by remembering her youngest brother, Devon, a charmer who loved - well, since he, much like his mother, who is also Kincaid's mother, had little use for memory and the responsibility it entails, there are only more questions than answers. By the end of the essay, it is clear that Devon liked cricket, had little interest in work, loved smoking marijuana, did well in school until he didn't want to, spent time in jail, dreamed of singing with a band, perhaps enjoyed frequent sex with women, and contracted HIV; he died of AIDS; he may have been homosexual. Kincaid must keep asking "Who is he?" because the life he had was like a life she might have had and didn't. Shadows occlude the brightness of her brother's life and limit making full sense of "the what really happened, the what might have really happened, and how it led to what was actually happening."

No matter how compelling and harrowing the events that make up My Brother are, they would be nothing apart from Kincaid's amazing, merciless prose (amazing because merciless), which catches, always, "everything whether [someone] liked it or not" in the dramatic glamour of her sentences. With My Brother, it is now possible to discern that Kincaid, through the consideration of what fiction is, what autobiography is, what an essay is ("something that was partly imaginary, something that was partly a fact; but the parts that were imaginary, the parts that were only facts, were all true"), is writing an anthropology of the self. Her book's only counterpart in the daring of its beauty and strangeness, in its steadfast, relentless plumbing of the self's depths and surfaces, and the language that helps shape them, is Michel Leiris' La Regle du Jeu. Kincaid revisits, in ways similar to Elizabeth Bishop remapping her earlier poems in Geography III, the thematic concerns of much of her earlier work, in particular, A Small Place, her poised, damning expose of Antigua, tourism, and the aftermath of colonialism, and her fictional story "My Mother." The latter begins with a young girl wishing her mother dead, asking for forgiveness, and when her mother embraces her, she suffocates, "breathless, for a time uncountable, until one day, for a reason she has kept to herself, she shook me out and stood me under a tree and I started to breathe again."

To keep breathing, Kincaid moved away, changed her name, to confront daily but from afar the difficulty known as Mother. My Brother is the narrative of the events in which her brother ("the one who was dying, who has died, who while dying could not take himself to the bathroom and freely control his bowel movements") and his life became forever joined with her own, not merely by blood but by literature and the fires of maternal rage. When Kincaid was fifteen her mother told her to watch her two-year-old brother while she went out. Teenage Kincaid didn't notice her brother's diapers needed changing because she spent more of the day reading than baby-sitting, since she "did not like anything else as much as I liked reading a book, a book of any kind." Her mother came home, saw the unchanged diaper and seeing it, realizing that her family's "prospects were not more than the contents," she "gathered all the books of mine she could find" and "set fire to them." Kincaid ends her book by revealing that she has "spent the rest of [her] life trying to bring those books back to [her] life by writing them again and again until they were perfect, unscathed by fire of any kind."

Such perfection protects as it continues to punish. But while she may loathe her mother, disdain her actions, she is her mother's daughter. Kincaid has harnessed the ferocity and mercilessness she condemns in her mother, disciplining her prose into an unrelenting observation of what is as dose to the truth as possible about how the world and the human beings in it live or don't live, who remembers and who cannot.

Bruce Hainley is a contributing editor of Artforum and Index.