Linden Hills /

Cynically and bitterly, Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place writes of a group of middle- and upper-middle-class blacks who have assimilated the values of the white world. She shows her contempt for them by using two young men as counterpointsthe two visit Linden Hills at Christmas and show the hypocrisy of the town's citizens. PW found that the ``narrative seems constructed and contrived rather than animated by the inner energy that distinguished Naylor's previous work. The novel as a whole is cold and preachy.'' (March) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Linden Hills is a jewel of a black-suburban neighborhood, a place where the showplace residents ""could forget that the world said you spelled black with a capital nothing."" But Luther Nedeed, descendant of the original shaper of this dream-community, knows that something has gone wrong here. (""Linden Hills wasn't black; it was successful."") And Naylor probes the ""bright nothing"" of lives in Linden Hills through the ramblings of two young men: Willie Mason, one of the unfavored black poor, who has 665 poems in his head; and Lester Tilson, one of Linden Hills' wild cards. The two friends dip in and out of empty ceremonies, soulless homes, and icy-cold drives, doing odd jobs. Lester is caustic, angry, punishing; Willie is curious, compassionate, feeling for morality's hard ground. They observe the doomed men around them: homosexual Winston, forced into marriage and the Linden Hills mold; Xavier and Maxwell, exquisitely-lifestyled ""Super Niggers"" at General Motors, brooding on the impossibility of marrying black career women. They hear the voices of dissent break through here and there: Rev. Hollis has a drunken atavistic lapse into gutsier truths at a designer-label funeral; Lester's dead grandmother (in memories) warns that ""you can lose yourself in other people's minds."" And meanwhile, in the Nedeed mortuary/basement, a woman dies slowly, learning death beside Luther's dead, white son--with the ""ghostly presence mocking everything the Nedeeds had built."" Naylor intensifies the socio-cultural vision here with myth and symbolic imagery--occasionally becoming a bit shrill in these perhaps-inevitable echoes of Toni Morrison. But her humor, both sad and satiric, is distinctive; Willie and Lester are vital, earthy, boisterously irreverent guides; and, crisper and punchier than Naylor's Women of Brewster Place debut (1982), this is a haunting homiletic--with a cohesive strength of statement concerning black aspiration within a tarnished American Dream. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.