"The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark," Jamaica Kincaid writes in the essay "On Seeing England for the First Time" (1991). And it is this space, which "starts out empty . . . but rapidly becomes filled up with obsession or desire or hatred or love--sometimes all of these things," that the West Indian American author has insisted on inhabiting throughout her literary career. Whether she is writing about the loss of a mother's love, the cruelty and narcissism of the colonial environment, her brother's death from AIDS, or the plants in her garden, Kincaid holds in solution a sense of endless loss and betrayal that is complicated by a love for the betrayer. This love, once inculcated in the trusting young heart, can never truly die, despite what one may later learn. In inhabiting this space, Kincaid has made herself a...