Black Marks

A young African-American artist's troubled, emotionally dislocated experience in Cambridge, Mass., and Jamaica comprises Hoyte's uneven, structurally disorienting debut. Georgette Collins is the product of wealthy, well-connected black parents in Cambridge, who divorce and send the youngster to her grandmother Nina's house in Kingston, Jamaica, for summer vacations in the early 1980s. Georgette learns patois and absorbs Nina's fabulous stories, while back in Boston she attends the all-girls' Ellis School, where she possesses the only Afro in a sea of smooth ponytails. Years later, after college at Harvard and coming out as a lesbian, Georgette works as a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Her ruptured narrative reveals a troubling (and fairly incredible) loss of memory: she awakens one day in her early 30s to discover she has "no past." Georgette embarks on an aimless chain of self-destructive behavior, such as sleeping with men she can't remember picking up and avoiding people at her job because of her "blank slate of... mind." Gradually, Hoyte fills in some gaps: her stint as the "kept woman" of a controlling rich white lover, Amanda, alcoholism and psychiatric counseling. Hoyte lays out a sympathetic catalogue of Georgette's painful struggles, but her narrator's memory loss makes for an awkward dramatization of feelings of alienation. (Feb.)