ANNA IN-BETWEEN By Elizabeth Nunez

ANNA IN-BETWEEN By Elizabeth Nunez
347 pp. Akashic Books. $22.95

Caribbean Variations
By AMY FINNERTY*
(The New York Times Book Review)

The title of her latest novel suggests a sit-com, or the upbeat identity lit marketed to teenagers. But Elizabeth Nunez layers “Anna In-Between,” a psychologically and emotionally astute family portrait, with dark themes like racism, cancer and the bittersweet longing of the immigrant. Foremost, she explores the late innings of a successful marriage, in which husband and wife cling together in the shadow of mortality.
Anna is a book editor in New York whose job is to nurture writers “of color” for a specialty imprint. Returning to the unnamed Caribbean island of her childhood to visit her aging parents, John and Beatrice Sinclair, she discovers that her mother has breast cancer and, infuriatingly, has been praying the rosary in solitude rather than seeing a doctor. John, a restrained provider with a profound respect for privacy, has been aware of Beatrice’s condition, but has remained passively silent.
Upwardly mobile during colonial years, Anna’s parents are as stiff-lipped as the British and as stoic as their enslaved ancestors. Anna’s “in-between” status strands her between enlightened progress (American medicine and the sharing of feelings) and her parents’ propriety; between youth and middle age; between the lonely self-sufficiency of her life in New York, which she has convinced herself is fulfilling, and the unassailable structure and security of her parents’ household. The career-minded Anna also feels the generational chasm between herself and women like her mother, who throughout her life has been honored, cherished and financially supported while not working.
Growing up relatively privileged, Anna had been called “roast breadfruit” — dark outside, white inside — by her peers while enduring racist insults from the soon-to-depart colonizers. Now, she quotes T. S. Eliot and identifies with Jane Austen’s heroines. She wants to transcend race and edit books that are neither “chick lit” nor “urban lit” nor “ghetto lit” but “serious literary” works. Yet she must serve the publishing-industry bottom line that panders to niche readerships, or lose the impressive job from which she derives so much of her self-esteem.
John, a pragmatist and former civil servant, has also had to inhabit ethical gray areas, acting at one time as the Euro­peans’ “local man,” negotiating labor contracts for the oil industry. While Beatrice enjoys the fruits of his labor, ordering servants about, Anna feels conflicted about being served tea by a maid, in an exclusive enclave with “well-tended lawns on one side of the iron gates, . . . garbage on the other.”
Divorced and childless, she’s also an awkward fit in her childhood home. Despite her parents’ unvarying routine of naps, meals and gardening, their traditional, undemonstrative marriage has proved more durable than her own, sustained by a long shared history and the embers of passion.
The plot is as languorous as the Sinclairs’ retirement, with Nunez, whose previous novels include “Bruised Hibiscus” and “Prospero’s Daughter,” taking detours into the island’s social history and Anna’s multiethnic ancestry. Africans, Asians and Europeans have mixed, but subtle resentments and snobberies endure. The East Indians are perceived by some as “clannish,” more willing than blacks to sacrifice to send a family member to college. The Hindus and Muslims who arrived as indentured workers have thrived and are “competing with each other in a show of religious fervor,” building ghastly shrines on their suburban lots.
Sophisticated Anna seems at first to have outgrown both the postage-stamp geography of the place and her parents’ values. But she ultimately gives in to the rhythms and small decencies of her tropical birthplace.
Her parents are revealed to her in all their complexity and provide her with a model for happiness.
*Amy Finnerty is an editor at World Affairs Journal.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/books/review/Finnerty-t.html?ref=books