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Third-World Person Singular : LUCY By Jamaica Kincaid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $16.95; 164 pp.)

RICHARD EDER

October 21, 1990|RICHAR DEDER

Lewis, she discovers, is having an affair. For all his grace and kindness, he is no different from the men back in Antigua. "Everyone knew that men have no morals, that they do not know how to behave, that they do not know how to treat other people. It was why men like laws so much; it was why they had to invent such things--they need a guide."

Lucy has her own succession of boys and young men; Kincaid writes of the affairs with comic insouciance. Sex is an untroubled hunger for her and none of her lovers touch her in any real way. But she carries with her a deeply troubling fantasy about a fisherman who groped one of her friends back in Antigua when she was a child.

She will leave her \o7 au pair \f7 job, remain friends with Mariah, find work as a receptionist, share an apartment with a New York roommate. She will continue to look at things and learn, coolly and voraciously; suspended between first and third worlds, between hunger and self-sufficiency, yearning and detached judgment. At the end, she has started a journal and has wept over the very first line: "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it." She will turn the page and go on writing.

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