same position, attempt to overcome poverty and anguish in their lives as they also try to overcome both structural limitations that they face and personal ills that haunt them.
Linden Hills, which is Naylor's second novel, seems to be an entirely different story altogether, told in a different way for different ends. But once one accepts the model that authors are engaged in a long series of interconnected and reiterated stories, it becomes clear that these two books have deep resonances with each other.
There are in fact some superficial similarities between the two books, most notably in that in each book Naylor uses a confined geographic setting to construct a tale about the interconnected lives of a group of black characters. But Linden Hills is a much more ambitious work because the realistic setting, dialogue and concerns that Naylor addresses in The Women of Brewster Street have been replaced in Linden Hills by an allegorical world in which both place and character exist only to further some larger point of the author. They have no existence in themselves. This may sound odd û for of course no artistic creation has any true life outside of its creatorÆs desires and purposes. But it is also true that one of the major conceits and developments in modern (as well as post-modern) fiction has been the illusion that the characters have some significant autonomy. Linden Hills takes us back at least a century to when both authors and their readers believed in authorial autonomy in a way that is barely (and rarely) possible today. What is in many ways a regressive strategy sometimes fails Naylor, although it is difficult to tell if this is because she does not have the skill to bring off such an ambitious project or because we, as readers, do not have the required skills (or the needed practice) to read allegories.
NaylorÆs work is, of course, not an entirely original allegory; rather it is û like Amiri BarakaÆs 1965 work ...