Will I love The Street?

This book demonstrates that prose doesn’t have to be lyrical to leave an indelible impact on readers.

Lutie Johnson is a single mother living in a rundown building on the street. Her desires are simply articulated as are the barriers keeping her from achieving them. Lutie spends most of the novel dodging the clutches of men who think they deserve her just because they desire her, and a neighborhood snake-eyed madam who wants to exploit Lutie’s beauty.

Petry begins the book describing a cold November wind and continues with an icy precision that will entrance the reader until the very… show more.

I read The Street a few years after I moved out of Harlem, where this novel is set. I was immediately struck by the continuities between Petry’s depressed 1940s Harlem and the gentrified neighborhood I encountered in the 2010s. Petry looked past myth and legacy and observed people and institutions. I think her story felt so resonant decades later because she could see the circuitry and infrastructure of New York City, and that insight informs her storytelling at every level. The Street’s gut-wrenching climax lands because, leading up to it, Petry so skillfully catalogs the injustices that can flow… show more.