In her highly acclaimed fiction …, [Toni Cade Bambara] emphasizes the necessity for black people to maintain their best traditions, to remain healthy and whole as they struggle for political power. "The Salt Eaters," her first novel, eloquently summarizes and extends the abiding concerns of her previous work.

The central action of the novel is the healing of Velma Henry, an attempted suicide….

Through flashbacks, stream-of-consciousness, a complex interweaving of plot, subplot and digression, the substance of Velma's life and the lives of the black people of Claybourne are gradually revealed. The reader must synthesize the mosaic, piece together fragmentary bits of character, scene, story-line as they flash in and out of the narrative. With the force and freedom of great traditional storytellers—the "boldness and design" that one character asserts is the essence of black creativity—the narrator shuttles backward and forward in time, plunges the reader into the middle of conversations, thoughts, dreams. Characters at the periphery of one scene suddenly take center stage in others. Part of the pleasure of the novel derives from these dislocations and affronts (are we really supposed to believe the conversations between people and spirits?), the sudden juxtaposition of the real and unreal, the imaginary and the actual…. "The Salt Eaters" questions and finally erodes the basis upon which such distinctions customarily depend.

To accommodate her complex vision, Toni Cade Bambara takes lots of chances. Her novel is set in the black section of a large Southern city, a city much like Atlanta, perhaps, with problems of urban blight, pollution, corrupt politicians, racial tension, and so on. But her characters also inhabit the nonlinear, sacred space and sacred time of traditional African religion—the realm of Great Time, in which man lives both on the earth and in the presence of his gods. (p. 14)

In its best moments the novel recalls Faulknerian montage, the harmonic counterpoint of the poetry and prose of Jean Toomer's "Cane," the symbolic and imagistic richness of Toni Morrison's "Song of Solomon" and Leslie Silko's "Ceremony," the interplay of history, folklore and black speech in the works of Albert Murray and Leon Forrest. The novel's perspective is multi-cultural; its language rings the changes from scientific jargon to street slang. The gift for rendering accurate, snappy, allusive dialogue is as evident in Toni Cade Bambara's novel as it's been in her short fiction.

The novel's strengths are related to its weaknesses. Velma's trouble is obviously more than an individual neurosis, but how well do we get to know her, her plight, its resolution? Luminous moments imprint Velma's reality on the reader's consciousness, but do the scattered moments ultimately fuse, coalesce, so that we know and care who Velma is?… Digressions may be a way to achieve a panoramic, comprehensive overview, but they stretch the fabric of the narrative dangerously thin. The baroque convolutions of individual sentences, the proliferation of character and incident sometimes seems forced, detracting from the forward flow of the book.

Yet this demanding, haunting, funny, scary novel is persuasive. The words that open the book…. "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?"—ask a question of all of us. Getting well entails risk, honesty, a commitment to struggle, a collective effort that Toni Cade Bambara documents with the voices and lives of the Southwest Community's people. She makes us understand that what is at stake in Velma Henry's journey back to health is not only one woman's life but the survival of the planet…. (pp. 14, 28)