In the following excerpt, Matus discusses the final chapter of The Women of Brewster Place and the effect of deferring or postponing closure.

After presenting a loose community of six stories, each focusing on a particular character, Gloria Naylor constructs a seventh, ostensibly designed to draw discrete elements together, to "round off' the collection. As its name suggests, "The Block Party" is a vision of community effort, everyone's story. We discover after a first reading, however, that the narrative of the party is in fact Mattie's dream vision, from which she awakens perspiring in her bed. The "real" party for which Etta is rousing her has yet to take place, and we never get to hear how it turns out. Authorial sleight of hand in offering Mattie's dream as reality is quite deliberate, since the narrative counts on the reader's credulity and encourages the reader to take...