Imagine a sort of Catfish Row moved North. Snow and rain have replaced the buzzards as omens, and Ben, a pure-hearted janitor who drinks too much, is standing in for Porgy Bess, Serena and Clara are now called Mattie and Etta Mae and Ciel, but the street's universe still twirls around its women—tough, caring, sexy, sometimes mean, mostly tired, often loyal. (As one of them remarks, "All the good men are either dead or waiting to be born.")

A long tradition of urban fiction and nonfiction, cinema and theater has made places like Catfish Row instantaneously recognizable—and dangerously stereotypic. Even if Gloria Naylor's first novel ["The Women of Brewster Place"] were not the emotionally satisfying and technically accomplished book that it is, her decision to set it on Brewster Place, a one-street "ghetto," would have been courageous. What is marvelous, however, is that she doubled her...