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Edwidge Danticat. Claire of the Sea Light. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307271792
Max Ardin Sr., the suspiciously high- minded schoolmaster in Claire of the Sea Light, says something memorable about life's painful separations when he tells the part-time teacher and sometimes lover whose dismissal from both roles he has just cleverly, discrete- ly effected: "You're like a starfish, con- stantly in need of a piece of yourself breaking off and walking away in order to become something new."
Another way of looking at sepa- ration, Edwidge Danticat's signature theme, is the attitude expressed by the novel's titular Claire. Early in the fiction, the seven-year-old dis- appears into hiding rather than let herself be given away by her hard- pressed, widowed fisherman father to a widow with space in her life for a daughter. Suspended unhelp- fully between these two divergent attitudes are the half-dozen or so Ville Rose residents whom we meet, mostly,...