Though Miss Hansberry is frequently guilty [in "The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window"] of ladling out words with a soup-spoon ("these two implacable pools of cynicism" are simply a man's eyes) and though she has wasted time name-dropping among Village intellectuals …, she has still forced a good many vigorous attitudes through the verbal smog and she sometimes finishes off an exchange as though a skull had been smartly cracked.

What makes her virtues hard to get at is the loose bag in which she has packed them, for all the world like a shopper who has come from a supermarket of false hopes with bundles that won't stay bundled and keep dropping regularly to the floor. The narrative embrace in which she has hoped to hold all her despairs is a thing, spindly, an arbitrary thing. [Sidney Brustein] is a Villager who has stopped believing in causes; he...