Cascading Uncertainties

In her 2019 memoir, Shame on Me, Tessa McWatt recalled a time when a teacher asked her, “What are you?” She was just eight years old, but she had a kaleidoscopic lineage: Guyanese, Canadian, Chinese, Portuguese, Indian, Arawak, Scottish, English, and French. Her great-great-grandfather was the cousin of an overseer on a sugar plantation in the former British Guiana; nothing is known about his African wife. Generations of her family “pulse with miscegenation.” Navigating the issue of belonging must be akin to jumping from one moving ice floe to another.

The tug-of-war of identity is the subject of McWatt’s seventh novel, The Snow Line. Different from many fictions about immigrants, the novel explores more than the disorientation of adapting to life in a strange land. The narrative is concerned instead with the often mixed-race second and third generations — those who...