Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy

Imagine being born and raised in a place but getting continual clues — some subtle and some not so subtle — that you don’t entirely belong there. And imagine simultaneously being told, sometimes blatantly, sometimes tacitly, that the place where you do belong is a faraway island where you’ve never set foot.

That’s the situation facing narrator Faith Jackson, the London-born daughter of Jamaican immigrant parents in Andrea Levy’s 1999 novel, Fruit of the Lemon, now enjoying its first publication in the United States.

Levy’s more recent novel, Small Island, won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2004. Fruit of the Lemon may not have won any prizes, but it makes it clear that Small Island didn’t come out of nowhere. In both novels, the voice is warm, the observation sharp, and the author’s sense of how personal and cultural histories are intertwined is persuasively acute.

Faith, growing up in north London, naturally considers herself English. A recent graduate from art college, she lives in a group house with three English friends — all white — and she gets a quiet kick out of being at the heart of British pop culture, thanks to her job in the wardrobe department of a television studio (clearly the BBC).

Still, on two fronts, she keeps getting small shocks that undermine her sense of self. There are minor flurries at work, including an exchange with a colleague who laments sympathetically — if not necessarily accurately — that Faith will never get the promotion she wants because of her color. Faith’s reaction to this and other situations like it is to take the high road, put on her “best `I’ve-got-a-degree’ accent” and assure every stranger she meets that she’s just like them. But when she and one of her housemates stumble onto an ugly hate-crime scene, she’s shaken to the core.

At the same time, on the home front, her parents deliver a different kind of blow. They are, they say, considering returning home to Jamaica — not just for a visit but for good. To which Faith can only respond, “Why Jamaica? Why is Jamaica home?”

Everything combines to wear her down to the point where she can’t function. Soon her parents step in and half-coerce her into following the only remedy they can think of — two weeks in Jamaica so she can step outside herself and get a better notion of where she and her family came from.

Her first reaction upon arrival in Kingston is culture shock. (The term, Faith feels, is hardly adequate to “the feelings of panic and terror” she’s experiencing.) Gradually, however, she yields more willingly to her Jamaican surroundings, especially her Aunt Coral’s tales of near and distant relatives in the Jackson family tree.

Fruit of the Lemon falls into two neat halves — the first dealing with Faith’s growing disorientation in her native England, the second chronicling her slow regaining of confidence in Jamaica. The book would be almost too neat, too schematic, if it weren’t for the ambiguities that Levy weaves into both sections.

Hardly any of the signals Faith picks up on in London is delivered straight, and there’s as much kindness and good humor directed her way as there is prejudice. As for Jamaica, it has its own brands of prejudice. In almost every “shocking story” Faith hears about her family (Aunt Coral delights in telling these), dark-skin-versus-light-skin biases play a crucial role in who is allowed to befriend, marry or lord it over whom.

Levy savors all these family tales and has a keen ear for the patois in which they’re told (just as she has an impeccable ear for a variety of British accents). The flexible, humane touch she brings to her portraits of people and places is reminiscent of the work of Eudora Welty or Anne Tyler. And while Fruit of the Lemon can feel a little loose or episodic in structure at times, it always feels genuine and it’s unfailingly revealing of the various terrains it explores.