|
|
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Home is Where Your Hell Is, November 24, 2002
Borrowing its theme and structure from Dante's Inferno, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills deals with the destructive path of upwardly mobile suburban blacks as they plunge into a world of progressive meaninglessness and material "possession." And there is a connection to Graham Swift's Waterland: the need for stories and story-telling at the root of, describing our being. Before the very successful exectuive Laurel plunges thirty feet to her death, she requests her 80-year-old grandmother Roberta to tell her stories of growing up, to give her substance and meaning to her empty existence.In this work about black people, about a northeast town owned and built by the owners of the local morgue, resentment is endemic. "A wad of spit-a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America." Post-slavery politics and the ironies of culture in America, racial prejudice and segragation and class conflicts, even within the African-American community, and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression are at the heart of this book. Run by five generations of morgue caretakers, the Luther Needed family are the replacements for white oppression in an all-black town. The frog-like Luthers always married a pale bride who spewed forth a miniature Luther frog, that is, until Willa Prescott Nedeed, who is dark herself, but bares a pale sickly creature unnamed and unwanted by his father, is taught to spell Sinclair by his mother. The story covers the course of six days. One way Naylor deconstructs the official history is in her attempt to subvert linear notions of causation, which is a post-modernist reaction to the traditional Aristotelian linear narrative form. Not only does Naylor fuse together various parts of narratively disjointed fiction into one integrated whole, she also, through language, fuses "memory" to a present reality to create an integrated whole. This happens again: The day after Willie's prophetic dream of a missing face, "he swung himself down the ladder at the far end, the high aquamarine walls looming over him as he ran. Pink and beige stains were slowly spreading form Laurel's body into the surrounding snow. From the angle of the neck, she couldn't possibly be alive, but he had the irrational fear that she might be suffocating...Without thinking, he turned her over."
While Willie experiences the memory of this prophetic dream come to life, Naylor switches scenes-and typeface- to allow Willa, still locked captive in the basement, to complete the fusion of memory with a present reality by speaking the words that Willie would have said: "Her face was gone." Naylor's book shows how people's nonquestioning, their acceptance and passivity-impulses opposed to the world creation of the artist-get them in trouble. Hers is a world of essential homelessness, of beings uprooted, torn from the bedrock of their homeland and thrown into modern America. In attempting to put black man's mark upon the new world, the townspeople of Linden Hills are more apt to put a black mark on the new world-a black mark that is more like the white devils they are trying to counter than any hopeful ideal. Naylor shows that the enemy is within or, at the limit, that there is no enemy. Things are not black and white or, there is black in white, white in black. The miscegenation has already always begun. At once a work of questioning, and one embracing the colorful revisionism of an artist dealing in the human materials of desperation, Naylor's message is cryptically hopeful: "an ebony jewel that reflected the soul of Wayne County but reflected it black."
|
by Gloria Naylor
by Gloria Naylor
by Toni Morrison
by Lorraine Hansberry
See all 7 books this book cites
