Last week, I read The Street by Ann Petry. It was this month’s law school book club selection, and it may have been the most positively rated book of any we’ve read in the last three years. We had such a great discussion this weekend, and I’ve been dying to talk about it with you. Before it was picked for book club, I’d never heard of this book. Now that I’ve read it, I feel like this should be required reading for everyone.
Lutie Johnson, an African American woman, is a single mother during World War II. At the start of the novel, she’s living with her father and his latest girlfriend, because she and her husband are separated after she took a job as a live-in maid to support the family and he had an affair. Lutie is worried about the influence her alcoholic father and his girlfriend are having on her eight-year-old son, so she sets out to find an apartment of her own. She rents a place on the fifth floor of a building in Harlem, on 116th street, between 7th and 8th to be exact. The super is extremely creepy and is obviously attracted to her in a really creepy way, one of her neighbors is running a quasi-brothel, and the white man who owns the building is also attempting to entice Lutie to sleep with him. Actually everyone is trying to entice Lutie to sleep with them, and Lutie is trying to raise her son as best she can and keep her dignity and take the next small step in the American dream.
We follow Lutie as she struggles to find a way to save more money so they can move to a better apartment where she and her son will feel safer, but we also follow the super’s point of view, the super’s girlfriend’s point of view, the downstairs neighbor’s point of view, and more. Lutie is definitely the main character of the book, but it’s told in an omniscient style. We even get some of the point of view of the street they live on. The street is as much a character as everyone else.
This book was so good! Like I said, it should be required reading for everybody.
First of all, the writing is fabulous, the story is solid, and it is a fast, easy read. The setting was described so well too, and it was so easy to get immersed in the world. I found myself trying to tell Lutie out loud “no, don’t do that! Don’t do it! It’s a bad decision!” But the world and the situation are depicted so well that it is entirely believable that she makes those decisions, because there are no other decisions she can make.
Second, I believe this is the first book by a woman of color that sold more than a million copies. You should read it just for that.
Third, this book takes place during World War II, but honestly it could take place today. It was such a timeless book, and while it’s depressing that we haven’t come all that far since the 1940s when it comes to race and poverty and gender, it also makes this book all the more relevant and important to read.
I would not recommend listening to the audiobook for this one, because it has bad sound effects. The other thing I will say about this book is that it is pretty heavy-handed with the theme. You don’t have to work to figure it out. It hammers it home, sometimes a little too much.
But all in all, I loved this book. It was so poignant and heartbreaking. It had this relentless, driving momentum that made everything seem inevitable and awful in its inevitability, even as I personally couldn’t predict what would happen next. All along, there really are no good decisions. There is only one decision.
For you, that one decision is to read this book.
I one hundred percent recommend you read The Street, whoever you are, whatever you normally like to read. Go read it. Go read it now.
And if you’ve already read it, tell me your thoughts. Do you agree with my assessment? Disagree? Have anything to add?