In The Men of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor not only revisits the dilapidated urban environs of her award-winning first novel, she breathes new life into the male residents who once wreaked havoc in the lives of African American women. Brewster Place's men, once mere shadows hardly deserving of the marginal space lent to their characterization, assume center stage in Naylor's latest work of fiction, telling of the trials and tribulations which have led them where they are. Naylor, a skillful writer adept at creating a range of uniquely individual characters—each with a story to tell—turns her artistic and political attention to the plight of the black man, and she does so in such a way as to render a compelling fictional exposé of his dilemma.

Passages from Naylor's first novel are strategically placed in her more recent one, lest the reader/audience lose sight of the author's rather obvious attempt at establishing an intertextual relationship between the works. Much like a Greek chorus, the voice of Ben, fatherly alcoholic janitor, weaves its way in and out of each story, establishing the time and place and introducing the characters. Naylor's appropriation of a male voice as a literary device is not new, however, for in her fourth novel, Bailey's Cafe, she uses the Voice of Bailey to allow the reader/audience access to the poignant tales the cafe patrons spin. But more than the shadowy World War II veteran Bailey, Ben is at once both detached observer of and participant in the complex struggles the men face. His is an elusive quest for self despite prescriptive notions of manhood and sexual identity.

It is appropriate indeed that Ben introduces the reader/audience to Naylor's male subjects. Resurrecting his spirit and voice is a clever narrative strategy, one that not only helps to establish intertextual continuity but also plunges the reader/audience into the Dantesque realm that is a hallmark of Naylor's fiction. Ben's situation, traceable to slavery and its bitter legacy of emasculation, is everyman's dilemma, and his story of injustice, anger, powerlessness, and despair offers and historical frame for the contextualization of the stories the other men relate. One of Naylor's goals in this novel is to elevate the men's personal situation from the individual to the collective realm. This is the truth which the first epigraph conveys: “Why should it be my loneliness, / Why should it be my song, / Why should it be my dream / deferred / overlong?” Ben, much like his grandfather, an ex-slave turned sharecropper who is unable to protect a sister from the sexual abuse black women often experienced, fails to rescue his daughter from Mr. Clyde's sexual exploitation. Ben's touching story links the past, present, and future in such a way as to direct attention to the timelessness of the black male situation. Here she offers what is missing in the first novel, an in-depth focus on the repressed anger that prompts Ben's retreat into alcoholism:

I feel a slight dampness in my hands because my fingernails have broken through the skin of my palms and the blood is seeping down my fingers. I look at Elvira's dark, braided head and wonder why I don't just take my hands out of my pockets and stop the bleeding by pressing them around it. Just lock my elbows on her shoulders and place one hand on each side of her temples and then in toward each other until the blood stops.

Not surprisingly, orthodox religion, which Naylor holds up for scrutiny throughout her canon, fails to address the problems the men face. It is religion that furthers oppression by encouraging blacks to suffer in silence while awaiting divine retribution for racial wrongs. This is the message which the novel's second epigraph conveys: “God slumbers in a back alley / With a gin bottle in His hand. / Come on, God, get up and fight / like a man.” Ben's grandfather “was a silent old man who sat on his porch rocker. A man who shunned the church, holding a closed Bible, while he searched for another kind of God in another kind of world than the one who told black men that the only way to be a man was to suffer and be still.” The suggestion that compensatory religion with its otherworldly ethos is hostile to the achievement of genuine manhood is not new in the black novel tradition. But one wishes that Naylor had suggested an alternative to Christianity, perhaps in the Black Muslim religion and the teachings of Louis Farrakhan. Instead, she indicts the black church without exploring some of the alternatives which black men in the contemporary urban arena embrace.

Male characters exist in what appears to be eternal stasis—a narrative void figured by the novel's richly suggestive Dusk-to-Dawn structure. There is Eugene, a well-intentioned husband and father unable to conquer a tendency toward homosexuality; Reverend Woods, a wolf in sheep's clothing, is all too willing to sacrifice his soul on the altar of political gain; Basil atones for his part in Mattie Michael's displacement by marrying an irresponsible mother of two; the autistic Jerome, a talented pianist whose blues playing rivals that of Jelly Roll Morton or Count Basie, is cursed with a mother who exploits his gift for monetary gain; the street-wise C. C. Baker is driven as much by fear as anger and rebellion; and Abshu, perennial community activist and playwright, struggles in vain to rescue the ill-fated community from its inevitable demise. With each narrator there is an effort to achieve conscious manhood in a society that denies equal access to the tokens of manhood—money, power, and respect. This is the point Naylor emphasizes, perhaps a bit too heavy-handedly. Equally important in her representation of the contemporary black situation is the notion that black women are co-laborers in the struggle for equality. Ben tells the reader early on that “… there was always a her in his story.” Somehow, though, the idea that there needs to be intraracial unity in order to achieve progress remains underdeveloped, and the women in the text are as demonized as their male counterparts are in Naylor's earlier novels. The tension between genders remains unresolved.

If the failing community is to reach a millennial new dawn, there needs to be group solidarity. Naylor's nationalist ideology is apparent enough. But Abshu's musings about a million men marching on behalf of Brewster's uplift does little to convince the reader that revolution is possible, given the community's internal strife. Even the barbershop, a well-defined space, with its emphasis on male bonding and brotherliness, is limited in its role in bringing about solidarity. The brothers, however well-meaning, fail to rescue the suicidal Greasy, whose crack addiction leads to and is the consequence of despair. Greasy's final unavailing plea “‘I'm a man … I'm a man …’” falls on deaf ears.

Ultimately, the men's collective denial of their role in perpetuating Greasy's private hell makes his suicide all the more tragic. The responsibility for addressing the black plight therefore rests with the reader/audience, and Naylor raises a number of important issues: Have men suffered enough for the historic wrongs committed against women? Can they find redemption through the channels of political activism, social service, brotherhood, the gay lifestyle, or perhaps the blues? Naylor presents no pat answers to the complicated socio-political questions she raises. Instead, she merely foregrounds the experiences of contemporary black men struggling for manhood in hopes that society will act to bring an end to injustice.

In Naylor's latest novel there is little, if any, of the lyrical prose which readers have come to expect from this gifted novelist. Noticeably absent as well are the intriguing significations upon texts within and outside of the black literary tradition. The male characters, although vividly drawn, lack much of the emotional involvement and depth that make Naylor's female characters so memorable. Nevertheless, in her efforts to (re)create a literary space for the black man's story—his insistent blues, as it were—the novel offers a much needed glimpse into the inner life of black men from a black woman's perspective and thus represents an important contribution to contemporary African American letters.