As a middle-class Bostonian black herself, Dorothy West is well placed both to reflect and to criticise the aspirations and prejudices of the black bourgeoisie, and she does so to startling effect in the simple stories and lyrical essays of The Richer, The Poorer. Her 1994 novel The Wedding is less immediately accessible, being a cross between a family saga and a parable with an odd mixture of quasi-Biblical narrative tone and hard-edged social realism.
