LUCY by Jamaica Kincaid (Plume: $8.95)....

LUCY by Jamaica Kincaid (Plume: $8.95). Jamaica Kincaid’s fourth novel chronicles the reactions of a 19-year-old West Indian au pair to life in yuppie Manhattan. Having grown up in poverty, Lucy is astonished when her employers fail to appreciate the abundance that surrounds them. She watches impatiently as Lewis and Mariah fret over trifles, needlessly complicating what should be lives of blissful ease. When an unseasonal snowstorm depresses Mariah, Lucy muses, “How do you get to be a person who is made miserable because the weather changed its mind, because the weather doesn’t live up to your expectations?” Kincaid needlessly complicates the novel with an unconvincing subplot involving Lucy’s friendship with an Irish au pair and a group of downtown artists, but the central tale of a sharply observant stranger in a strange land emerges as a telling portrait of the drearily materialistic lives of well-to-do Americans.