The Islands

September 5, 2022
The characters in Irving’s penetrating collection (after the novel Quint), many of whom are Jamaican Canadians, navigate the persistent hurdles of their family relationships as they attempt to build new lives while reckoning with the past. In “Waking Life,” Jamaican Canadian travel writer Po meets her Jamaican British mother, Janice, for the first time since early childhood, and her mother’s uncompromising independence fuels Po’s hope of keeping alive her own fragile romantic relationship. In “Canal,” a Jamaican Panamanian Canadian woman, Pilar, travels to Panama from Canada to settle her childhood maid’s affairs, realizing only as an adult that it was her maid’s history as a Holocaust survivor that shaped the fierce protection she gave Pilar during the 1965 riots that led to her family’s emigration. “It is hard to be the last one left,” Pilar thinks. Throughout, and in lucid prose, Irving depicts her characters’ chilly shocks over unexpected gaps in intimacy with their loved ones as they work to fit into non-immigrant Black spaces, making for stories that are both class-conscious and richly atmospheric. Irving’s inviting combination of subjects and style heralds a welcome new voice. Agent: Paul Lucas, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

September 1, 2022
An expansive collection of stories chronicling the Jamaican diaspora. In this assured collection, Canadian writer Irving follows the threads of colonialism, exile, and immigration throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. "Canal" connects Jamaica, Panama, postwar Germany, and Canada through the figure of a girl forced to flee as a result of American intervention. In "The Gifts," the book's moving penultimate installment, a young woman named Peaches moves to "Foreign" (England) to find work and winds up serving as both maid and mistress in the same family. Irving's writing is most effective when she homes in on a smaller domestic scene--for instance, the mismatched married couple in "The Cape" is divided by age and a sudden injury--but the international range and scope of her collection give it breadth and freshness. Despite the book's wide range of locales, Irving's writing of place always feels assured. Her prose is smooth and unfussy despite occasional clunky sentences ("When he gets home she will be broken. Not by him, but in spite of him"). Although the collection is enjoyable, Irving's construction of narrative can sometimes feel predictable: In several stories, characters are first presented one way--racist hicks; an earnest but clueless White mother; a long-lost parent--only for Irving to introduce a shift in perspective that encourages the reader not to judge so hastily. But a careful reader (or a frequent reader of short story collections) will soon become familiar with this convention, and instead of leading to a feeling of real enlightenment, the stories will feel tired. Irving is at her best in odd, harsh moments: a gruesome fireworks injury in "The Cape"; an estranged father stealing a pig for his daughter in "Weaving." A first collection that hints at bigger things to come.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022
In a series of 12 stories as sparkling and sharp-edged as cut diamonds, Irving explores the multifaceted experiences of Jamaican expats. Whether in Panama, London, France, Florida, or Cape Cod, her characters deal with love, betrayal, poverty, social unease, and political upheaval shadowed by an unspoken longing for home. Certain themes predominate. Rich white men take advantage of poorer Black young women. Older women warn younger ones not to "take up these English ways," sucking their teeth at "quasi Jamaicans." Color and class barriers transcend race; a light-skinned daughter-in-law's purpose is "to inject some good hair into their family's genetic pool. To give the family that taste of the American Dream that all of their hard work and private schools could not." The mistress of a wealthy poet attempts to separate herself from the entitled white guests at a Jamaican resort yet fails miserably to connect with the Black staff, who see her as just another American whose displeasure could threaten their jobs. An overeager but culturally ignorant white woman offers to staff the Jamaican booth for her school's International Day. Covering the 1950s to the present, Irving wields the written word as a sharp-tooled instrument, incising the lasting effects of colonialism and family dysfunction.

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