SOURCE: “Same Train be Back Tomorrer: AnnPetry's The Narrows and The Repetition of History,” in MELUS, Vol. 24, Spring, 1999, pp. 141–159.

In the following essay, Barry notes that Petry has a cyclical view of history but at the same time a sense of optimism even in the face of racism, classism, and sexism.

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In interviews and writings from the 1970s and 1980s, Ann Petry frequently laments the decline in the current state of life in urban ghettos, remarking that it is worse than it was when she wrote The Street, a 1946 bestseller. “The sad truth about The Street is that now forty-one years later I could write that same book about Harlem or any other ghetto,” she writes in a 1988 autobiographical essay (Contemporary Authors 265). In 1992 she told the Washington Post something similar: where ghetto life and race relations in the United States are concerned, “everything is worse” than it has...