SOURCE: Wilentz, Gay. “Healing the Wounds of Time.” Women's Review of Books 10, no. 5 (February 1993): 15–16.

In the following excerpt, Wilentz praises Bailey's Cafe for addressing a “broad spectrum” of the female African-American experience.

Gloria Naylor, in Bailey's Cafe, addresses female circumcision in Africa (in this case, Ethiopia) as part of a larger examination of the sexual mutilations inflicted on women in contemporary society. Like Alice Walker's Tashi, Naylor's characters are based on archetypes—mostly from the Bible—but, unlike Tashi, they are not universalized. The novel takes place in a blues cafe down a dead-end street at the tip of New York City. On this city block are Bailey's cafe, Eve's garden and boardinghouse and Gabe's pawnshop. The novel's fluid time-sequence culminates in New Year's Eve, 1949. As in her other novels, Naylor infuses day-to-day living with an alternate, magical reality.

Bailey and, at times, his wife Nadine orchestrate the...