'Linden Hills', by Gloria Naylor: hell is an American suburb

Welcome to Linden Hills, the

hellish

neighborhood where everyone wants to live. It is located somewhere in Wayne County, and is ruled by the tyrannical Needed family, commanded by the malevolent Luther Needed. Luther Needed's relationship with the world is the darkest. And not only with the world, that is, with all those candidates - never too good - for future neighbors, but also with his family, which he suffocates without remedy. And this is something that he hides in plain sight in the epicenter of such an idyllic place. Idyllic? What can be idyllic about a

hellish

place ? The appearance, of course. All those houses with Japanese gardens and marble pools that

inevitably attract photographers from the prestigious

Life magazine.

Conceived as a rewriting of

Dante's

Divine Comedy ,

Linden Hills

is the second novel by the winner of the National Book Award (in 1983, the year in which she debuted), the woman who was a telephone operator—like her mother—before entering the Yale and changing the course of African-American literature in the suburbs, and not just in the suburbs, Gloria Naylor. Naylor turns the neighborhood into a character, in fact,

the

main character, an unattainable and desired

hell

—it is divided by

arches

, arches that are reminiscent of the rings in Dante's classic, through which Dante himself, Accompanied by Virgil, he must descend until he encounters the devil himself—in whom he is not believed to be burning because the opposite is said about him.

It is said that only those who “have worked hard, fought hard and saved a lot” have

the right

to live there. Arriving at Linden Hills means “achieving success,” but not everyone can achieve it, because there is a guardian—the

devil

, Mr. Needed, whose family has been acting as a

filter

since the first houses were built on the hill, so close to the blocks in which everyone else lives, all those who will never be able to cross one of its doors, which are even more obscene—that only allows people with “certain characteristics” to live there. He explores, Naylor, the control mechanisms of every community, with the acidity of a suburban classic, but a classic, for once,

black

.

Promotional portrait of the writer Gloria Naylor.TOM KELLER (NORDICA)

Yes, because both Luther Needed and most of the aspiring neighbors are African-American. There they could forget, writes Naylor, from the vantage point of an all-powerful narrator, who describes, without judging, but attentive to unauthorized detours and evident frustrations before the walls that what will be said raises, those aspirants, and their houses and

positions

. Applicants led by a couple of young men, White Willie and Shit Lester. The first is an outsider from the blocks, the second, a resident of Linden Hills. They both

descend

the hill in search of work, and each time they access a better house, because that is how Linden Hills is built, so that the climb involves a physical descent until they reach the ravine where the Needed reside.

Originally published in 1985, just two years after Naylor—who had just turned 35 at the time—won the National Book Award,

Linden Hills

gave an ambitious twist to a type of narrative, that of the terrible and dysfunctional of the life in an affluent suburb, something that John Cheever inaugurated in the forties and that still exists today, and despite this powerful and meticulous shot by Naylor - a time bomb built with what was observed: Naylor kept, since she was a child, a diary in the who wrote down everything that did not appear in the books—is still purely white. There are many reasons why

Linden Hills

is a milestone - also formally: its prose is crystalline, muscular, addictive - but the main one has to do with the monstrosity of pursuing a dream that will never let itself be trapped because it requires your dissatisfaction, of your desperation, to exist.

Look for it in your bookstore

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