Half Changed World

Over the summer, Wayne at Rag & Bone Shop posted a list of 10 books he recommended.  One of them was The Street, by Ann Petry, a book I had never heard of.  Wayne wrote:

"If you want to encounter the volatile, turbulent issue of race in America, Petry’s novel offers a more relevant and authentic and comprehensive account of it, from the perspective of Lutie Johnson—intelligent, talented, brave, and doomed Lutie Johnson with her eight-year-old son. It’s coarse and claustrophobic and nearly hopeless—and very, very good."

Right away I requested it from my library, and eventually got it, and then I put it on the shelf with the rest of my library books.  And when it was due, I renewed it.  And when it was due again, I renewed it again, still without having picked it up.  They only allow two renewals, so I finally put it in my bag to read on the metro.  And then I started reading it, and I was hooked.

I don’t think it’s giving away anything of the plot to say that from very early in the book, it is quite clear that Lutie is doomed.  In many ways, The Street is a horror story, in which evil lurks around every corner but the heroine keeps escaping, until the end, when she doesn’t.  And even so, I didn’t see the final twist coming.

The edition that I got from the library has a cover blurb by Gloria Naylor, in which she says "Forty-five years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry in this painfully honest and wrenching novel.  Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic."  Nice of her to say this, since having read The Street, The Women of Brewster Place seems like a pale imitation.  (No pun intended — although I will note that this is one of the few English idioms where lightness is undesirable.)  While the story mostly follows Lutie Johnson and her dreams of a better life, some of the strongest parts of the story are where Petry changes perspective for a chapter, and dips into the point of view of one of the other people whose lives intersect with Lutie’s.  Suddenly someone who has seemed part of the scenery flickers into life as a full person, with dreams and fears of his or her own.

Lutie is a little too perfect to be fully believable as a character, and Petry gives her long interior monologues that are clearly speaking with the author’s voice.  But the anger and the frustration and the shattered hopes ring through as strongly today as they did almost 60 years ago:

"No matter what it cost them, people had to come to places like the Junto, she thought.  They had to replace the haunting silences of rented rooms and little apartments with the murmor of voices, the sound of laughter; they had to empty two or three small glasses of liquid gold so they could believe in themselves again.

"She frowned.  Two beers and the movie for Bub and the budget she had planned so carefully was ruined.  If she did this very often, there wouldn’t be much point in having a budget — for she couldn’t budget what she didn’t have.

"For a brief moment she tried to look into the future.  She still couldn’t see anything — couldn’t see anything at all but 116th Street and a job that paid barely enough for food and rent and a handful of clothes.  Year after year like that.  She tried to recapture the feeling of self-confidence she had had earlier in the evening, but it refused to return, for she rebelled at the thought of day after day of work and night after night caged in that apartment that no amount of scrubbing would ever really get clean."

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 6:12 am and is filed under Books, Poverty and Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.