The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that writers do not necessarily live very interesting lives. Wrangling with editors, hatereading your rivals, making coffee and (occasionally) typing are all consuming occupations, but not the stuff of prepossessing narrative. That, at least, wasn’t an issue for Jean Rhys, whose colonial childhood and dissolute adulthood gave her ample material for fiction. But reprocessed by Caryl Phillips as the subject of this new novel, Rhys (or rather Gwendoline, since she has yet to take her pen name in the period Phillips covers) is somehow rendered boring.
A fractured relationship with her mother means that Gwen is never at home in her Caribbean birthplace; at boarding school in England, her foreignness marks her out for cruelty from the other girls, who call her ‘white cockroach’.
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