At first the method of repetition turned me off, but I soldiered on and halfway through I began to understand what Kincaid was up to and accept some of the repetition in the following ways:
1. A refrain or chorus that is repeated throughout, such as the repeating of Mr. Potter’s birth and death dates, who his parents were, who Elaine (the narrator’s) parents were, that Potter could not read and could not write but Elaine could, and so forth–all facts that as they repeat and repeat accumulate in meaning until by book’s end you realize why the narrator dwells on such facts as she tries to make sense of this father she never knew, this father who never claimed her. If the book were a song or a suite of songs or an opera, they’d be melodies and choruses and refrains that would convey meaning to us whenever they appeared in the structure.
2. Anaphora where the same words or phrases are repeated at the beginning of sections or chapters or even within a paragraph lifting the prose into not quite poetry but quite poetic passages. “There was a line drawn through me” was one of the more successful moments of this.
3. A way of thinking that spins out an idea or fact and repeats the idea or fact in the same words but a different order, almost as if Elaine is stating the facts and then turning them over and over again in her hands, looking at them from different angles, dissembling the parts and rebuilding the shapes to see if the shapes change, to make sense of the shapes.
And I liked this quote:
“…often a thing that is ugly is ugly in itself, and often a thing that is ugly is only a thing that is forgotten, kept from view and kept from memory, and often a thing that is ugly is not only a definition of beauty itself but also renders beauty as something beyond words or beyond any kind of description.”