Mayaro Gold: The Fiction of Michael Anthony

The absence of a full-length study of the fiction of Michael Anthony is a lamentable gap in West Indian Literary criticism. Roydon Salick sets out to correct this lacuna in a balanced study of fifteen of Anthony's works of fiction, in which he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of this writer of tales, short stories, and novels.

The author makes a convincing case for Anthony as an important populist writer whose works are written with the average reader in mind through simple plots, a lucid style, and uncomplicated narrative techniques. For Salick, Anthony’s real strength as a writer lies not in his ability to fashion absorbing plots but in his ability to depict memorable characters and create a sense of place. He may not have produced anything as great as A House for Mr. Biswas or as trend-setting as A Brighter Sun, but any writer whose work so memorably puts the town of San Fernando or the village of Mayaro on the literary map, so successfully marries island history and fiction, so tellingly depicts so many facets of Trinidadian culture, and so movingly explores the word of adolescence is one who must be taken seriously, pedestalled, and cherished.