elping them along to their gradual downfall.
The Nedeeds built their home in the exact center of Tupelo Drive, the lowest level of the neighborhood, and surrounded it with a moat. Above them there were eight crescent shaped drives and a rise in social status was signified by moving down to the better houses closer to the Nedeeds at the bottom of Linden Hills. Naylor patterned the story after Dante's Inferno and the eight crescents, along with Tupelo Drive, constitute the nine circles of hell. The evil and the guilt of sinners increased in Dante's hell as one went lower, culminating in the center of evil, Satan, who, like the Nedeeds, was located at the exact center of a frozen lake in the lowest pit of hell. Naylor also paralleled Dante's story of his journey through hell in which he was accompanied by the poet Virgil who was a resident of Limbo--a resting place for those who were not actually sinful but had never been baptized and could not enter Paradise. In the novel Lester "Shit" Tilson, whose family was never fully assimilated into Linden Hills, is the Virgil figure who guides his friend "White" Willie Mason through Linden Hills. Like Virgil, Lester lives in the Inferno but is not truly a part of it. Lester is a poet of sorts but he has resisted higher education, the 'baptism' that ensures progress down the slope. Willie, like Dante, is an outsider to Linden Hills and a poet. Also like Dante, who is honored by the attention of the ancient poets, Willie has memorized hundreds of poems and is, therefore, accompanied by "Baraka, Soyinka, Hughes, and most of Coleridge [and] Whitman" (45). The two young men do odd jobs over the course of several days, making their way down the hill toward the final catastrophe at the Nedeed house.
At the beginning of the book the current Luther Nedeed has decided that the whiteness of his son, who is otherwise a duplicate of himself, means that his wife has betrayed him and given him a...