Member-only story
The Man He Used To Be.
Review: Slaveroad, by John Edgar Wideman
There is a tragic irony to John Edgar Wideman’s hybrid work: his once-in-a-couple generations mastery of postmodern techniques has been in service of a story he’s only allowed to tell once. His writing outside of it has almost been obscured. Wideman has one of the most remarkable careers in English literature, bringing Baldwin, Borges, Faulkner, and Flaubert to his Black Pittsburg in work after unsung work, and his essays outside his personal narrative have shown a critical eye of race in culture. Yet for a very long time, they were subject to critical derision that barely read above grift rhetoric. Two Cities, his ode to the complexity of black love to endure the horror of gang violence, can hang right here with Clarice Lispector and Late career Virginia Woolf in it’s innovative literary transitions, but was trashed by the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as anti-white because….a character said some non-tangental-to-the-story about white people that had hurt the reviewer’s feelings. In the aughts, he was the subject of several calls for him to be shamed and censored for such transgressive takes as…(rolls eyes) being critical of the criminal justice system and the Iraq war….
America’s inability to see him at his finest, most penetrating, and most humane has all bur trapped him in the Horatio Alger-like narrative he created in…