"South Street" is an ambitious, scraggly novel with deep pockets and vast, bumping corners that reach into the "limbo between the Schuylkill and the Delaware," for a long, bitter look at the corrugated country of black Philadelphia. Its gifted young author, David Bradley, doesn't take us into the heartlands. South Street, with its "elephantine cockroaches and rats the size of cannon shells," exists at the border of the ghetto…. Rubbing against Lombard Street and white Philadelphia, South Street in Mr. Bradley's book becomes a kind of haunted wasteland with "softening tar," gap-tooth buildings, and its own disturbing life.

The locus of the novel seems to be Lightnin' Ed's bar, where Mr. Bradley's characters leak out their existence. (pp. 30, 32)

The tension of the novel is generated by Adlai Stevenson Brown, a mystery figure from outside the ghetto who enters Lightnin' Ed's and shames [numbers king] Leroy Briggs in front...