SOURCE: Erickson, Peter. Review of Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor. Kenyon Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1993): 197–207.

In the following excerpt, Erickson discusses Naylor's humor in Bailey's Cafe and comments on Naylor's views regarding cooperation among different racial and ethnic groups.

Bailey's Cafe is the fourth in a sequence of novels that Gloria Naylor has conceived as a quartet. Hitherto she has used two devices to create a sense of linkage from one novel to the next. The first is to develop a character or situation referred to in a previous novel; the second is to continue a pattern of allusions to Shakespeare.¹ In this final novel of the quartet, however, Naylor teases us by deferring fulfillment of these expectations for so long that we have just about forgotten or given up. For example, Mama Day, the third novel, has planted George's reference to his birth at Bailey's Cafe (130–31). Yet Naylor...