Publisher's Weekly Review
A self-professed curmudgeon, the Bailey, whose eatery gives Naylor's ( The Women of Brewster Place ) powerful, evocative new novel its title, serves up lousy coffee and greasy food at that crossroads of the world, Brooklyn in 1948. Along with his taciturn wife, Nadine, Bailey (not really his name; he just didn't change the sign when he bought the place) acts as tour guide, taking the reader through the lives of the cafe's habitues--prostitutes, pimps, madams and other human flotsam. For some, like sweet Esther and Jesse Bell, Bailey's is a last stop before oblivion. For others it offers redemption and rebirth. Their lives are revealed in lyrical vignettes combining first- and third-person narration. The slightly supernatural character of the cafe recalls elements in the author's Mama Day , and the story of Miss Maple, a cross-dressing male mathematics Ph.D. who finds fortune and liberation as housekeeper at the brownstone bordello down the block, is reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's finest work. Underscoring both the specificity of her characters' lives and the general ambience of black existence, Naylor movingly captures life in New York and America (``You can find Bailey's cafe in any town'') in the era that followed WW II. BOMC and QPB selections; major ad/ promo; author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Here, Naylor's limbo, peopled by tortured beings ``at the hopeless crossroads of [their] lives,'' is a darkly lyrical, both sad and warming, psychic way-station--an American backstreet cafe with terrible food, no cheering camaraderie, and a door that empties into nowhere--or, even scarier, Somewhere. Bailey (not his real name), who runs the cafe with his tough, silent partner Nadine, offers a few autobiographical ``tidbits'' and knows he's at the grill for the same reason the cafe's customers come in from everywhere. These are people on the edge who need a space to ``take a breather.'' These are the hurt, the deeply wounded. Even the ``one-note players''--like a Bible-shouter and a pimp--``got a life underneath.'' Then there are the life-crippled victims: the lady Sadie, a decaying prostitute, scoured by cruelty; Sweet Esther, who tends perverts and white roses in the dark; Peaches the nympho; and Jessie the druggie, ``robbed'' of husband and son. The women live with Eve in her boardinghouse by a garden, where visiting men must buy flowers for entrance. Eve, born of Delta dust, expelled from her home with Godfather (Bible emanations bobble here and there), gives some women a place to stay, is severe, fair, and can create hell. Also at Eve's is ``Miss Maple,'' a brilliant young man--an American superachiever, rejected and humiliated because he's black. (Once, he--like some others--steps out the cafe's backdoor into the void, ``since the place sits right on the margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility.'') And what could cause the souls in limbo to clap and sing? A richly melodic telling of sad tales--of innocence outraged and civilization smothered--and, again, as in Naylor's Mama Day (1988) and Linden Hills (1985), with a satiric glint and a generous dollop of the supernatural, plus the chill of apocalyptic voices.
Booklist Review
/*STARRED REVIEW*/ Vignettes set in microcosmic, metaphorical communities are Naylor's forte. In Mama Day, the setting is an island; Linden Hills is an upper-class suburb; and an apartment building becomes a universe in The Women of Brewster Place, her most acclaimed work to date. Bailey's Cafe will rival Brewster Place for accolades. Once again, Naylor has created a powerful cast of women characters, but she has varied her repertoire with several equally compelling men, including the proprietor of Bailey's Cafe, an enigmatic little 1940s eatery somewhere in the U.S. Called the maestro because he offhandedly conducts the voices of this keening chorus, he first regales us with his love for Negro League baseball and for his strong, quiet wife, and shares the haunting guilt and memories of fighting the Japanese in World War II. Then, one by one, we hear the disturbing stories of the cafe's regulars: Sadie the wino, Iceman Jones, recovered junkie Jesse Bell, Peaches the nymphomaniac, Miss Maple (whose real name is Stanley Beckwourth Booker T. Washington Carver), and Mariam, a black Ethiopian Jew. These are tales of woe and fortitude, prejudice and pride, ostracism and imprisonment. While the women suffer abuse and cruelty at the hands of their menfolk, the men suffer the oppression and violence of the white world, but each battle is noble, soul searing, and sorrowful. Naylor has, sublimely and intensely, balanced ideology and art, realism and mysticism, and hope and survival to transform the trials of outcasts into the truths of myth. (Reviewed July 1992)0151104506Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
Like Naylor's previous works, Mama Day ( LJ 2/15/88), Linden Hills ( LJ 4/15/85), and the award-winning The Women of Brewster Place ( LJ 6/15/82), this novel offers interesting characterizations in familiar settings imbued with mythic qualities. The cafe setting allows a range of characters to tell stories from their lives, each in a unique voice. Bailey's and the nearby boarding house (which some call a bordello) offer respite for those who have been battered in the outside world, and their long-lasting scars shape the book's narrations and interactions. The characterizations, distinctly and believably drawn, are Naylor's most interesting since her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place . Recommended for all contemporary fiction collections.-- Marie F. Jones, Muskingum Coll. Lib., New Concord, Ohio (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
