Review: The Street

The Street by Ann Petry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Naturalism is an appropriate style for describing the poor and downtrodden, for humans seem like beasts when social and political force crushes their will and leaves them warped by their desperate efforts to survive — hence the characters of the street, like Mrs. Hedges, who crawls out of the fire to become a pimp, or the superintendent, Jones, who creates his own world, Ulysses-like, even if it is a dank basement apartment, and he is both Ulysses and Cyclops in one.

Lutie Johnson owes something to the romantic chastity of Samuel Richardson, facing the facts Clarissa and Moll Flanders before her faced, that one cannot remain in tact, unspoilt, and still spring for material advantage in the world. No, only a separation will do, which implies the shocking ending to The Street, an ending I certainly didn’t see coming and won’t spoil for anyone now.

Ann Petry’s work suggests deep empathy with a character much like herself, if she had faced the mean streets of Harlem as a single mother, without the advantages Petry had as an educated middle class black woman, with a husband by her side. Without certain basic conditions, Lutie imagines, reminding us of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of Her Own,” there is no real way for Lutie or others in The Street to become human, individual, with possibility of free will. More practical and less metaphysical than Go Tell it on the Mountain or Native Son, The Street gives us the clear-sighted vision of the banality of inequality, how racial assumptions and gross self-absorption just reproduce the ugliness of society, over and over, essentially without end.

Kudos to the production on Audible.com, which features subtle, but significant sound effects like a door shut, a streetcar signal, a wall thudded, amplifying the realist dimension of Petry’s prose style.

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