In her first three novels, Gloria Naylor described urban African-American life with a graceful vigour that transcended, but did not discard, polemic; she found ways of portraying the lives of individuals, and in particular of women, who were damaged and scarred, but not overwhelmed, by racial and sexual oppression. Her fiction made small victories heroic, small defeats not dishonourable.

Naylor's new novel, Bailey's Cafe, is as episodic as her earlier book, The Women of Brewster Place, but it lacks the unifying commitment which kept that book so tightly structured under its apparently loose and flowing surface. The clients of a not especially clean diner, somewhere in urban America, tell their stories, or have them told by the husband and wife who run the diner. Sadie, anxious to please her drunken mother, becomes first a whore, then the beaten wife of a drunk, then a homeless drunk and whore who turns down one chance of happiness in order to save a man who shares her misery; Peaches scars her face to rid herself of a brutally jealous lover. The lives hardly impinge on each other, yet they share the same grief.

The problem with Bailey's Cafe is not the powerful subject-matter but the crass mechanism of the novel. Bailey, the bitter ex-soldier from Brooklyn, and Nadine, his quietly humorous wife, who makes terrific peach cobbler, are attractive creations, but it was a mistake to place them, not in a mundane diner in a particular location, but in a magic diner which is there, in whatever city, for the people who need to find it. A plot-device of that sort needs an autonomous poetic magic, and this is not Gloria Naylor's forte; the café, the pawn shop, and the boarding-house have neither the corny power of commercial fantasy nor the poetry of magical realism. When, at the end, the young Falasha, Mariam (who bears the triple burden of being black, Jewish and pregnant) is deprived of a happy ending and inadvertently summons a river that sweeps her away from child and friends, there is neither poetry nor charm, not even a sort of Twilight Zone plot logic to it; it seems merely gratuitous.

This flawed and misconceived book does contain many incidental felicities. A fine balance of details ties the episodes to particular times and places, and emotional outbursts make them universal. In the end, the serious mistakes in the book's structure do not entirely diminish Gloria Naylor's real gifts; this is a poor book from an admirable writer.