SOURCE: Kaveney, Roz. “At the Magic Diner.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4659 (17 July 1992): 20.

In the following mixed review, Kaveney praises Naylor as a gifted writer, but complains that Bailey's Cafe contains serious structural flaws.

In her first three novels, Gloria Naylor described urban African-American life with a graceful vigour that transcended, but did not discard, polemic; she found ways of portraying the lives of individuals, and in particular of women, who were damaged and scarred, but not overwhelmed, by racial and sexual oppression. Her fiction made small victories heroic, small defeats not dishonourable.

Naylor's new novel, Bailey's Cafe, is as episodic as her earlier book, The Women of Brewster Place, but it lacks the unifying commitment which kept that book so tightly structured under its apparently loose and flowing surface. The clients of a not especially clean diner, somewhere in urban America, tell their stories, or have them told...