The Street and Everywoman

CONTINUING THE fine tradition of Ntozake Shange and Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor is a Black woman writing about Black women's collective and unique experiences, mutual understandings, hostilities and rapport. But as in those authors' works, a metaphor for the world of Everyman lies within and between the lines.

Late of Brewster Place, formerly of the South, the North, and nowhere in particular, the seven women that travel through these stories are not always vibrant, nor are their lives necessarily riveting. None of them is intended primarily as a tragic figure, despite personal hardships, and Naylor occasionally errs too far towards the nonchalant in making that point clear: "She had almost learned to cope with his peculiar ways. A pot of burnt rice meant a fractured jaw or a wet bathroom floor a loose tooth." Each woman's story opens not with birth, or adolescence, or marriage, but with the moment that tragedy appears in her life, foreshadowing even greater misery.

Naylor's straightforward tone defies the usual gimmickry to which the subjects she treats so readily lend themselves: out-of-wed-lock pregnancy, parental shame and a runaway's difficulties, single women just a step ahead of poverty, abandoned wife-mothers, young Blacks struggling through militancy in search of dignity, the stereotypical welfare case, homosexuality in mainstream society. But out of this parade of social issues come the same personal interactions with which everyone is too familiar. The women's particular situations are merely a fog obscuring people who, Naylor convinces the reader, are at bottom typical. Fleshed out, these people cease to masquerade as stereotypes.

Unfortunately, the very issues about which Naylor writes with profound clarity prove one of the novel's greatest downfalls. She wants to write about so many issues that at times she seems anxious to squeeze in at least a one-line comment about every contemporary social issue. At a moment when the protagonist of one story is on her knees, paralyzed with fear and horror before six youths who are about to rape her, Naylor takes time out to comment on the problems of the rapists:

So Lorraine found herself on her knees, surrounded by the most dangerous species in existence--human males with an erection to validate in a world that was only six feet wide.

A subject easily worthy of its own story, the phrase strikes the reader as inappropriate and distracting--or at best ill-timed. But at other times, the reverse of such superficiality creates an equal problem. Naylor seems to fear that she will be misinterpreted or over-simplified, so she overstates her messages, diminishing the power with which she initially invested her words. She must yet learn the force of understatement, of latency, for when she relaxes and less her reader work at subtly stated subject matter, her style is a promise fulfilled.

NAYLOR'S TIGHTLY PACKED visual imagery soars to the level of high art more often than it falls short; her ability to evoke reality in all of its unpleasant truthfulness falters only when it slips into sentimentality. "Hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased, these women of Brewster Place, hands on hips, straight-backed, round-bellied, high-behinded women" have no interest or time to be maudlin. In this first novel, Naylor also demonstrates a rare mastery of the Black idiom and a delicate sense of balance in her usage. Chronology, the anathema of many a more seasoned writer, is the building block of the novel. Flashbacks, recollections and some of the finest dream sequences in contemporary fiction, intermingle to make each story strikingly circular, each one returning to a face, a memory, or a symbol that invoked the episode in the first place. At the last, Naylor completes the haunting cycle, bringing together, spiritually or physically or both, the lives of all the women with the life cycle of the street itself.

Naylor's talent shows through this first work, much as one would imagine an art student's attempts to hang a master's painting. First, the frame is unsuitable; then the place on the wall seems ill-chosen. Finally, that's all fixed, but the whole is still slightly crooked, as if perhaps a more experienced eye is called for--or, in Naylor's case, another book--to get it exactly right. Nevertheless, the beauty of the work is already appreciable, and one anticipates eagerly its ultimate perfection. Patricia S. Bellinger