Gloria Naylor centers her radiant first novel, "The Women of Brewster Place," not in a specific city but in the chipped concrete and stinking trash cans of any dead-end slum block. In language as intricately whorled as mahogany, Naylor sculpts profiles of seven women….

"The Women of Brewster Place" is no pallid tale of attenuated perception recollected over cappuccino; Naylor is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions….

Naylor's potency wells up from her language. With prose as rich as poetry, a passage will suddenly take off and sing like a spiritual….

Vibrating with undisguised emotion, "The Women of Brewster Place" springs from the same roots that produced the blues. Like them, her book sings of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America.

Deirdre Donahue, "The Sorrows of 7 Sisters," in The...