Caribbean passages : a critical perspective on new fiction from the West Indies /

Patteson (Mississippi State Univ.) limits his study to five contemporary writers from the British West Indies: Olive Senior (Jamaica), Zee Edgell (Belize), Shiva Naipaul and Robert Antoni (Trinidad), and Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts and England). All are novelists except Senior, who has only written short fiction and poetry; all have been the subject of numerous academic studies, except Philips, who will doubtless gain in stature as a result of Patteson's enthusiastic yet guarded analysis. Patteson shows race, family, women's roles, colonial dependency, and language to be crucial to an understanding of the new Caribbean fiction in English. This reviewer had difficulty endorsing the author's enthusiasm for Antoni's Divina Trace (1992)--which many consider merely an offspring of G.V. Desani's All about H. Hatterr (1951)--but Patteson's detailed study brings new light to Antoni's phantasmagoric fiction and proposes that it is on the creative level of Wilson Harris's novels. Few will disagree with the author's assertion that Naipaul has been neglected too long; but few will agree that Edgell "virtually founded" Belizean literature: Evan X. Hyde, Raymond Barrow, and Leo Bradley, some 20 years earlier, deserve that credit. The suggestion that Olive Senior's stories show the analogy between family relationships and colonial politics is original, and the detailed examination of the relationship of Jamaican dialect and the oral tradition to the development of a national consciousness is commendable. Recommended for comprehensive academic collections. A. L. McLeod; Rider University