SOURCE: Salkey, A. Review of At the Bottom of the River, by Jamaica Kincaid. World Literature Today 58, no. 2 (spring 1984): 316.

In the following review, Salkey discusses the defining characteristics of the stories comprising At the Bottom of the River.

Jamaica Kincaid's ten stories in At the Bottom of the River are not so much fictions as they are meditations, snippets of autobiographical essays and, in one instance, a Polonius-type exhortation. Their tone is narratively askew, echoic and, at the same time, distanced and abstract. Their compositional fabric is made out of a piling of minutiae of descriptive information, often in faux-naïf diction, concerning human quirks, superstitions, family intimacies and Caribbean cultural history.

The stories are based on the format of the folk riddle, on the truncated scenario of the reverie and dream, on the swirl of events of sentimental memory and, most of all, on metaphorical equivalence. Indeed...