Executive Director Jenny Emery Davidson recommends The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor.
A young woman leaned at the windowsill of her sixth-floor apartment. She looked at the traffic and the crowds along the street just beyond the dead-end one where her apartment stood. A pigeon flew past her, and “[s]he placed her dreams on the back of the bird and fantasized that it would glide forever in transparent silver circles until it ascended to the center of the universe and was swallowed up.”
It is language like this that makes me love Gloria Naylor’s work. In the span of a single sentence, she transforms a fleeting, forgettable moment into one that is transcendent. Throughout the novel The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor uses language with breathtaking elasticity to evoke the friction between the mundane grittiness of an urban apartment building and the poignant qualities of the people who live there.
The architecture of the novel is framed by Brewster Place itself: a housing development born of messy political negotiations that resulted in a gray apartment building on a dead-end street. It is a place that the city has pushed out of sight. But Naylor begins and ends the novel with Brewster Place, and it becomes mythic in the telling.
The novel focuses on seven Black women of different ages and backgrounds who all find themselves, for different reasons and with different expectations, living at Brewster Place. Each chapter opens the door on another character’s life, and the vastness of their experiences strains the walls of their Brewster Place apartments. These women are in turn reckless and silly and stubborn and sexy and proud and brave and humble and fearful and strong. They are mothers and teachers and widows and activists and lovers and sisters.
There is a loneliness to each of the characters, even as they are crowded among so many people in tight city quarters – and there are quiet but profound moments when they see each other’s loneliness, brush against it, and recognize the dreams that lie within it.
There is so much I love about this novel: how each woman’s story unfolds; how Brewster Place frames the novel as well as their lives; how the language changes how I see the world.
In some ways, The Women of Brewster Place reminds me of one of my other favorite novels, My Antonia by Willa Cather, though it is set decades later and in a city rather than the western plains. Both novels are anchored in a strong sense of place and tell the stories of female characters who are largely overlooked by the societies around them. Both novels show communities that teeter between being made and unmade, and they invite us to think of the individuals whose dreams are embroidered on those unraveling edges.
Note: The Women of Brewster Place is the pick for the Library’s Book Club to be held at 5:30 p.m. on August 6. More/register here.
Find The Women of Brewster Place in our collection here.
