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...