'Maybe this is a detective story,' a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman's novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It's a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any of Wideman's books that I've read. But they are not detective stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as if from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon. 'Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life?' Wideman asks in his memoir Brothers and Keepers (1984). 'Wasn't there something fundamental in my writing, in my capacity to function, that depended on flight, escape?' But Wideman is not avoiding the shocks and horrors, he is allowing himself to be haunted by them, evoking their aftermath in a series of deft and ingenious pictures, taken from all kinds of angles by a restless imagination. The aftermath, though, is as close as he gets, and the need to flee even from that is a measure of the force of the original blast.

LRB 27 November 1997 | PDF Download