Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar for a lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. When they enter a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he that she is a wealthy, married, white woman who’s crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve her life’s tedium. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters against the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their town and times.

Petry peoples the novel with a cast of characters written in mesmerizing detail—Weak Knees, Al the Nazi, and the female undertaker F.K. Jackson. As The Narrows sweeps ahead to its shattering denouement, Petry shines a harsh yet richly truthful light on the deforming harm that race and class wreak on human lives. In a fascinating introduction to this new edition, Keith Clark discusses the powerful prescience with which Petry chronicled the enduring ways tabloid journalism, smug elitism, and mob mentality distort and demonize African American men.