Linden Hills

...It is the province of Lacan's qa park: the voice of a culture that jabbers noisily at its people as they search in vain for meaning...

...Almost as soon as America created itself, its literature cast a stern eye toward its progress and predicted its decline...

...Her vision is of the aftershocks of assimilation and the double-loss it entails: the forfeiture by black Americans of a tenuous sense of a distinct past for the doubts and failings inherent in the world to which they so long dreamed of belonging...

...This idea is integral to Dante and, before him, to Augustine, for only in memory can we glimpse the possibility of eternity...

...Robert Jones FOR the women who live on Brewster Place, Linden Hills rises above their dead-end street as a dream to be achieved...

...Brewster Place lies at the end of a city...

...Tales of the American dream gone sour have become a truism in cultural criticism and a genre-unto-itself in twentieth-century fiction...

...As Lester Tilson and Willie Mason stroll down the crescent drives of Linden Hills to the home of its ancestral founder, Luther Needed, we experience an unnerving sense of a culture gone out of control...

...As Lester and Willie make their descent, Luther's wife, Willa, lies locked in a basement as punishment for her husband's paranoia...

...Willa gradually unearths relics of past Needed women driven mad as she is now...

...Self-knowledge is made possible only by memory...

...In Linden Hills, Naylor recreates Dante's city of Dis in The Inferno in an American suburb...

...Her characters are bereft of any link to a past or to a place that allows them to imagine an end to their exile, so they suffer oblivion...

...We have become so accustomed to hearing of our lemming-like plunge into futility, that despair has lost its affect...

...Boy, Richard Wright said, "when I thought of the essential bleakness of black life in America, I knew that Negroes had never been allowed to catch the full spirit of western civilization, that somehow they lived in it but not of it...

...In the ghetto of Brewster Place, the physical destruction is the secondary, or at least the parallel, move...

...There will always be room to breathe and an opportunity for limitless growth...

...She understands the ways in which geography infiltrates the mind and how our identification with a particular landscape determines our understanding of ourselves and our connection to a history...

...Linden Hills may be indistinguishable from any colorless, American suburb, but it flaunts everything that has been denied to those exiled from the standard baggage and measure of middle-class success...

...In "A Sketch of the Past," Virginia Woolf defined memory as the base upon which all of experience rests, the tie that binds all impressions and ideas, all life, to a context...

...To a large degree, our spirit of omnipotence and invincibility as a culture cannot be separated from the belief that the land will never run out...

...Both of Naylor's novels concern the death of remembrance...

...the meanings embedded in the encompassing world generate their own life and we find ourselves in society after-the-fact...

...its inhabitants live on the outskirts of history...

...Petersburg, Woolf's The Waves, all reconstruct a past as the present recedes into diffusion and meaninglessness...

...It is not the memory of a historical past shared by the culture encircling them...

...In the litany of the dead's secrets, Naylor bears witness to the possibility that we can disappear without a trace and be trampled unnoticed by a culture we have set in motion and are powerless to stop...

...Naylor's vision is uniquely modern in its depiction of culture as something independent to the lives struggling to adjust to its advancement...

...Naylor is a generation forty years subsequent to Wright's...

...At the end of The Women of Brewster Place, Naylor says that a street dies when it becomes lost to memory...

...There is an elegiac quality in these passages that is unrivaled in contemporary fiction...

...The loss of memory engenders the loss of will, and both precurse the slide into oblivion...

...In Black...

...Dis is Lucifer's city, the place of souls turned against themselves, those damned for ill-will, corruption of the spirit, and the perversion of social good for self-dreaming and glory...

...Understanding is remembrance, and the greatest novels of this century, Proust's La Recherche du Temps Perdu, Andrey Biely's St...

...It speaks: language simply goes on...

...In Linden Hills, Naylor brings us into the world to which the residents of Brewster Place aspired, and shows us that it too is a place of dead roads...

...Even places that have failed, like the ghost towns of California and Nevada, are predicated on this belief in expansion...

...We are possibly the most self-critical civilization in history...

...Naylor understands the contagion of an imaginative lack and our susceptibility to hopelessness...

...Especially in the present age, no ' 'serious'' writer earns his or her credentials without lamenting our lost innocence and our fall from grace...

...The lives as well as the homes come tumbling down together...

...Memory sets you free...

...The family is what they remember and the history of which they are part...

...Linden Hills is about the fallacy of independence and the seduction of will-lessness and forgetfulness...

...Geographical memory feeds our most potent legends and selfunderstanding and makes the country, even at its most desolate outposts, perpetually seem to be the isolate land of promise...

...When Naylor's characters speak of the past, it is always in terms of family, never in terms of a larger, cultural tradition...

...Willa Needed's cries haunt Lester's and Willie's walk through Linden Hills...

...And who, at their moment of starkest reflection, cannot remember how any of it began or how they have come so far...

...Her meaning is founded on the same sense of damnation that overwhelmed Dante's journey into hell...

...Few histories have been as psychically linked to the land as ours...

...For Naylor, damnation begins with the loss of memory of origins...

...It is this memorial event which allows meaning to unfold and enables us to imagine a future as we attempt to make sense of the past...

...Luwana Packerville, Evelyn Creton Needed...

...Gloria Naylor has not given the name of a place to her two novels accidentally...

...In Willa, Naylor echoes the bewilderment of those who unwittingly lost their way and find themselves deceived by a life they never imagined having...

...But these myths of origin and development are always the property of the 3 May 1985: 283 sovereign culture...

...Gloria Nay lor writes of ghost towns of another variety, for when she looks to the past, it is to a history of exclusion rather than promise...

...Our conception of the past and presumption of freedom for the unwavering, individual "I," are so grounded in an idea of vast and infinite space, that it doesn't matter if we now have diminished territories to conquer...

...The urban graveyards of Brewster Place have not been deserted by settlers, but abandoned by hope...

...These jinxed, desert towns stay in our memory as monuments to an eternal faith in the possibility of renewal, the belief that when the water runs dry or the gold disappears, we can begin again somewhere else...

...But her work diverges from fashionable, nihilistic novels in its evocation of the cruelty culture inflicts on all of its missing persons and the damnation awaiting those of us who automatically follow its course...

...In John Ciardi's translation of The Inferno, Dante hears the anguish of hell's dead spirits and asks: Master, what shades are these who lie buried in these chests and fill the air Commonweal: 284 with such a painful and unending cry...