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eavans 's review for:
Linden Hills
by Gloria Naylor
Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. The shining surface of their careers, brass railings, and cars hurt his eyes because it only reflected the bright nothing that was inside of them.
Gloria Naylor's Lindon Hills is somehow a perfect allegory of race, gender, and sexuality within the black community and the power structures put in place to keep the status quo. The premise is simple: friends Willie and Lester—two 20-year-old black men who decide to travel through the glittering Linden Hills to scrape enough money together for the holiday season. What they find instead a community rotting from the inside out and the deeply twisted lives that are caught up in all of it in the daunting imagery of Dante's Inferno.
The novel has at times 4 simultaneous storylines running throughout: the present, involving Willie and Lester; the other presents depicting Mr. Nedeed and another with his wife trapped in the basement; and the backstories of the characters Willie and Lester interact with through their journey through Linden Hills.
I absolutely loved the characters Willie and Lester and how who interact with as they descend into Linden Hills. It almost felt a little like a mystery novel at times; the characters revealing subtle clues as to their ills before the great reveal of their "sins". We meet a gay man marrying and making his lover be his best man to get a foot into Linden Hills, a man mourning his conveniently dead wife before he marries another, an alcoholic, burned out priest, a woman who loses all sense of meaning after leaving the warm home of her grandmother and "making it", and a creepy historian who documents every happening of Linden Hills—including the acts of our own Willie and Lester from the past few days without anyone knowing. I kept wondering each chapter who'd I'd see, what cast of characters I'd meet and chip away word by word to see who they really were.
A vivid addition to the novel was the southern gothic elements of that comes alive around Willa Nedeed in her basement. There's major Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre vibes in the calling across the hills of the trapped woman in the basement, the almost supernatural powers of Mr. Nedeed and his control over his own little section of hell. It's full of unnatural shadows and nightmares, dead children shrouded in lace and stiffening by the hour and fires (perhaps) purifying it all. It was exciting. It was something classic in an understandable, modern setting. It was amazing.
And so I really appreciated and enjoyed the ease that the book read in and the pervasiveness of the themes and symbols. For some, it may seem heavy-handed, but I think masking that in a novel such as this is would have been incredibly disingenuous and showed quite apparently the genius of Gloria Naylor. Her work in this story with the interwoven themes of and symbols of black and white, father and son, faces and identity, and material goods and their emptiness was beautiful and complex without being convoluted. It's the perfect allegory for the question of "making it" in a white man's world and a clear thesis against the philosophies of Booker T. Washington. It'll make you think, and I believe that's exactly what Naylor wanted.
"Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all."
Gloria Naylor's Lindon Hills is somehow a perfect allegory of race, gender, and sexuality within the black community and the power structures put in place to keep the status quo. The premise is simple: friends Willie and Lester—two 20-year-old black men who decide to travel through the glittering Linden Hills to scrape enough money together for the holiday season. What they find instead a community rotting from the inside out and the deeply twisted lives that are caught up in all of it in the daunting imagery of Dante's Inferno.
The novel has at times 4 simultaneous storylines running throughout: the present, involving Willie and Lester; the other presents depicting Mr. Nedeed and another with his wife trapped in the basement; and the backstories of the characters Willie and Lester interact with through their journey through Linden Hills.
I absolutely loved the characters Willie and Lester and how who interact with as they descend into Linden Hills. It almost felt a little like a mystery novel at times; the characters revealing subtle clues as to their ills before the great reveal of their "sins". We meet a gay man marrying and making his lover be his best man to get a foot into Linden Hills, a man mourning his conveniently dead wife before he marries another, an alcoholic, burned out priest, a woman who loses all sense of meaning after leaving the warm home of her grandmother and "making it", and a creepy historian who documents every happening of Linden Hills—including the acts of our own Willie and Lester from the past few days without anyone knowing. I kept wondering each chapter who'd I'd see, what cast of characters I'd meet and chip away word by word to see who they really were.
A vivid addition to the novel was the southern gothic elements of that comes alive around Willa Nedeed in her basement. There's major Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre vibes in the calling across the hills of the trapped woman in the basement, the almost supernatural powers of Mr. Nedeed and his control over his own little section of hell. It's full of unnatural shadows and nightmares, dead children shrouded in lace and stiffening by the hour and fires (perhaps) purifying it all. It was exciting. It was something classic in an understandable, modern setting. It was amazing.
And so I really appreciated and enjoyed the ease that the book read in and the pervasiveness of the themes and symbols. For some, it may seem heavy-handed, but I think masking that in a novel such as this is would have been incredibly disingenuous and showed quite apparently the genius of Gloria Naylor. Her work in this story with the interwoven themes of and symbols of black and white, father and son, faces and identity, and material goods and their emptiness was beautiful and complex without being convoluted. It's the perfect allegory for the question of "making it" in a white man's world and a clear thesis against the philosophies of Booker T. Washington. It'll make you think, and I believe that's exactly what Naylor wanted.
"Being white was the furthest thing from his mind, since he spent every waking moment trying to be no color at all."