John Freeman

No American writer dribbles a sentence quite like John Edgar Wideman. Watching him thread language between his legs and around the back is a bit like watching a Harlem Globetrotter vamp. See it a few times and you can forget how much skill is involved.

There is one opponent Wideman cannot entirely shake with this dance, though, and that is life itself. Over the past two decades Wideman has given us three separate memoirs about events that have indelibly marked him--the life imprisonment of his younger brother Robby (in "Brothers and Keepers") and the life imprisonment of his son, Jacob (in "Fatheralong"). A nephew was also murdered. (Wideman's novel "Two Cities" is dedicated to him.)

And so, although he graduated from an Ivy League school, became a Rhodes Scholar, taught at fine universities and became the only American writer to twice win the PEN/Faulkner Prize, John Edgar Wideman has remained painfully intimate with the cancers of violence, drug use and institutionalized poverty that afflict the African-American community. Success has not given him a reprieve.

"God's Gym," Wideman's latest dazzling collection of short fiction, reveals what happens when a writer of such prodigious facility wrestles with the demon of storytelling itself.

Readers used to short fiction coming from a safe remove ought to be forewarned here: "God's Gym" is close to the bone. In "Weight," for instance, a narrator tries to write his way into his mother's mind through her body and discovers she is suddenly talking back, irritated by being used in fiction. "That's what upset you, wasn't it," the narrator quips back. "Saying goodbye to you. Practicing for your death in a story."

Wideman's prose has always had a worked quality to it, and does here too, but in the last ten years he's layered in this jittery self-consciousness with restraint. He also knows it's good to occasionally let go and simply play, as he does in "The Silence of Thelonius Monk," which opens with a fistfight between two poets, turns into a love story, and then delivers a biography of sorts on the jazz great from its title.

Wideman has a reckoning to make, and aside from his obvious lyrical gifts, witnessing that on the page is one big reason why you should buy these stories, take them home, and hold on tight.

"God's Gym"

Stories by John Edgar Wideman

Houghton Mifflin, $23, 175 pages

(2005-03-08)

Also by John Freeman

Nonfiction Review
Matt Drudge recently appeared on the conservative talk show "Hannity & Colmes" to denounce, of all things, the selection of comedian Chris Rock to host the 2005 Academy Awards
(2005-02-22)

Fiction Review
It is awfully hard to write about a book by former prostitute and street hustler JT LeRoy without remarking upon who else is reading it
(2005-02-08)

Nonfiction Review
In March, the U.S. government released five British men from Guantánamo Bay after holding them for nearly three years
(2004-12-21)

Poetry Review
Jean Valentine made her poetic debut in 1965 with a book called "Dream Barker," a title that aptly bugled the arrival of a sensibility unlike any other in American letters
(2004-12-07)

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