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Title: Linden Hills (Contemporary American Fiction Series) by Gloria Naylor ISBN: 0-14-008829-6 Publisher: Viking Press Pub. Date: February, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.56 (16 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A Genuine Classic on Social Class
Comment: This novel stands far above most contemporary American literature. It's an intricate, smoothly allegorical warning about the dangers of climbing our society's class ladder. The network of allegorical symbolism works beautifully. And, along with that, the characters are highly credible as human beings whose thoughts and feelings deserve our sympathy. Except those dastardly Luther Nedeeds, of course, whose devil-like natures make them perfect, yet also perfectly tempting, occupants of the lowest circle of Naylor's Inferno. If you find this novel confusing at first, stick with it--the whole structure, a visit downward through various contemporary temptations and their potential costs--will become clear soon enough. Love, love, and love--that's where this book finally finds salvation. (Great companion piece: Where We Stand: Class Matters, by bell hooks.)
Rating: 4
Summary: Home is Where Your Hell Is
Comment: 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."
Rating: 5
Summary: Making it to the top?
Comment: Although this book is the followup to Dante's Inferno, I read it first. It is a haunting tale of black people making it to the top. The protagonist in this story is Luther Nedeed. Mr. Nedeed's family moved to Linden Hills(an area no one wanted to be associated with) made it into a funeral home, and eventually starting building cabins and renting them out. Over the years the little community grew and everybody wanted to live in Linden Hills,even the whites who wouldn't asscociate with it at first. Everyone thought that living in Linden Hills was making it, when in fact they were selling their souls for material things.................. You have to read it to find out the rest!!! Very good haunting story. Makes you wonder about your lifestyle.
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Title: Bailey's Cafe by Gloria Naylor ISBN: 0679748210 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 31 August, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Women of Brewster Place (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series) by Gloria Naylor ISBN: 014006690X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: June, 1983 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Mama Day by Gloria Naylor ISBN: 0679721819 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 April, 1989 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Accidental Asian : Notes of a Native Speaker by Eric Liu ISBN: 0375704868 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 07 September, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Joe Turner's Come and Gone: A Play in Two Acts by August Wilson ISBN: 0452260094 Publisher: New American Library Pub. Date: October, 1992 List Price(USD): $11.00 |
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