In her latest novel, Kin, Tayari Jones delivers a haunting tale of two friends, Annie and Vernice (called Niecy), who grow up in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, during the segregation era of 1950s America. The protagonists are defined by their motherlessness and their diverging drives to escape personal tragedies and pre-written destinies. Jones writes into unknowability—how far we can know another person, or oneself—in this novel of motherhood and sisterhood.
Cradle Friends United by Loss
The pair, who speak in alternating chapters, are “not the same, but still the same.” Each is tended to by mother figures—grandmothers, aunts—and gives meaning to each other’s lonely, questioning existence. As the narrative states: “When you don’t have your mother, you don’t really know who you are.” Annie’s mother has abandoned her but is apparently alive in Memphis, and Annie makes it her obsession to reconcile with her. Niecy’s mother, on the other hand, is lost forever, murdered by Niecy’s father. Where Annie holds out hope, Niecy has none; this fork in their futures leads Niecy toward a sensible, stable life path—college, a traditional marriage—while Annie spirals from tragedy to tragedy, consumed by thoughts of her missing mother.
Hypnotic Prose and Thematic Depth
Jones’s idiomatic, hypnotic prose pulls the reader in, and she playfully threads tropes of twinning, doubling, and foiling throughout the novel, which alleviates the melancholy and makes plot twists shine. “Some truths are too bitter to let sit on your tongue,” we are told. Merciless violence and melodrama are kept off the page as the pair navigate the faultlines of racism and classism—there is an incident on a bus and another in a laundromat, where Jones shows remarkable restraint. She re-utilizes the epistolary device from her Women’s Prize-winning novel, An American Marriage, to glue the women together through words as the years tear them in different directions. When they eventually reunite, the question remains: will they recognize who they’ve each become, now with a new set of secrets in tow? “I struggled to decide if secrets and lies were twins, regular sisters, or just cousins,” reflects one character.
A Cautionary Tale About Love
Ultimately, the novel dissects what happens when you love selflessly, endlessly, unrequitedly, into the dark; when maternal love, or the lack thereof, turns poisonous and parasitic; and when a mother’s love, meant to nourish and sustain the soul, instead drains and destroys it. As Jones writes: “Everything requires water to live. But not too much. That’s the paradox of water. You need it, but it can kill you.” By turns pacy and profound, Kin is a cautionary tale about the limits of love, both rendered and received. “Love, I learned, was the responsibility of the one doing the loving. The other person didn’t necessarily have to make a contribution to the stew,” and “that’s why you got to be careful who you give it to. They can put your love in their back pocket and never give it back.”
Grief as a Spell
Is there a more fundamental loss, a more acute fissure than that caused by losing the one who gave you life? “Grief is a kind of spell,” and with Kin, Jones casts one on her readers, leaving us certain something has—quietly, almost unknowingly—stirred within our souls. The novel is published by Oneworld (£18.99).
