nother man's child. He locks the pair in the basement, intending to starve the child and reduce his wife to a state of mechanical dependency that will assure that their next child will be his. The child must be as black as Luther Nedeeds have always been--otherwise the self-hating, based on race, that motivates Nedeed will be pointless. Throughout the novel the current Mrs. Nedeed discovers traces of her predecessors in the cellar where she is imprisoned and the horrors of their existence are slowly revealed in the course of the book.
Section 1, December 19: The parallels between Dante's Inferno and Linden Hills are not exact and if a reader sometimes gets the impression in the Inferno that it is Dante rather than God who is handing out punishments, this is certainly true of Naylor. The best example is her elevation of Paolo and Francesca from hell. Ruth Anderson is a woman who has escaped from a 'good' marriage in Linden Hills and turned to Norman Anderson, a mentally ill man whose periodic fits of insanity make their lives miserable. But Rut
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