Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion.

Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 2001. 170 pp. $29.95.

Charles Wilson's volume on Gloria Naylor is one of twenty-five titles in the Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers series. A panel of high school teachers selects best-selling or critically acclaimed writers for the series, and the target audience is the general reading public and, more specifically, high school and undergraduate first- and second-year students and first-time teachers of the various authors. Wilson understands well the goals of the series and addresses his audience with unencumbered, jargon-free prose, defining terms and placing the text in a larger context. Throughout the series, readers find a similar formula--a brief biography of the author, an exploration of the writer's literary heritage, followed by individual accounts of each novel. Chapters about the novels are divided by plot, character, and thematic development, narrative strategies or techniques, and historical context, and conclude with a suggestion of how each book may be read through a particular theoretical lens. The books also contain substantial bibliographies of the authors' works and critics' commentaries on their works.

Wilson connects Naylor's professional interest in transcending boundaries with her personal interest in doing so. In an interview with the author, Wilson discovers Naylor's lack of tolerance for human stupidity, which she defines as "the refusal to look beyond one's tiny horizons and to interpret the world only from one's small point of view." Naylor's books demand a reading that defies a tidy pattern, for these tiny details in each character's life push both the character and the reader into larger understandings of the human experience. In "Literary Heritage," Wilson sums up the African American literary tradition as one of response, a reaction to the dominant European-influenced literary voice. He begins with the slave narrative, with emphasis on Olaudah Equiano, jumps to Phillis Wheatley, and then to the artist in the present, with attention to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

In a quick overview, he places each of Naylor's novels into traditions worth thinking about--indicating how she bridges the European conventions and African art. He names the obvious--Dante's Inferno and Linden Hills (with connections as well to the Gothic novel, influences of Edgar Allan Poe, and the picaresque and epistolary novel), and Shakespeare's The Tempest and Mama Day--and the less obvious--Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bailey's Cafe. Although Wilson observes that each of Naylor's novels takes on a more complicated task, he reduces the task to succinct sound bites; for example, Bailey's Cafe is "consumed with psychological fragmentation." Naylor's appreciation for Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is well-known, and readers have no trouble recalling Zora Neale Hurston's hurricane scene in Their Eyes Were Watching God when reading about George's first visit to Willow Springs in Mama Day. Although Wilson adds Ntozake Shange to the list of Naylor influences, he fails to make specific connections.

Wilson renders insightful and careful readings of the novels, with thoughtful theoretical choices. He reads The Women of Brewster Place through a feminist lens; to Linden Hills, he applies intertextual analysis, pairing Naylor's work with Dante's Inferno and suggesting Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a possible partner. For Mama Day, he selects a psychoanalytical approach, while using deconstruction for Bailey's Cafe, "but not in the typical way," rather as a schema to "uncover the ambiguity, flaws, gaps, and contradictions in life in general." Finally, in The Men of Brewster Place, Wilson chooses a postcolonial reading, suggesting that Naylor's men "must first see themselves not as inferior objects, but instead as agents in their own lives who can initiate change."

Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion is not a book aimed at Naylor-or African American-scholars, but those who choose to do so would find themselves quickly engaged in a presentation that offers more than its share of new connections and possibilities. Gloria Naylor is a substantial talent, and Wilson's work contributes to a growing body of vital critical commentary, and perhaps more importantly makes the reader eager for Naylor's next novel.

[c] 2002 Margaret Whitt