528
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
Black Boy.
For
Black Boy,
shorn of
(American Hunger),
is Wright's best
book, at once the center and circumference of all that he did, and a
book that is as central and as important as any in the whole of American
literature.
James Olney
Looking Back
PHILADELPHIA FIRE. By John Edgar Widem an.
Vintage Books.
$10.00.
THE STORIES OF JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN . By Jo hn Edgar
Wideman.
Pantheon. $24.50.
THE HOMEWOOD BOOKS. By John Edgar Wideman.
University of
Pittsburgh Press. $24.95.
John Edgar Wideman's literary career was until recently most no–
table for its ironic successes. Although between 1967 and 1990 he pub–
lished seven novels and two short story collections, Wideman became
best known for his one nonfiction book,
Brothers and Keepers
(1984), a
powerful personal documentary about his younger brother Robby, con–
victed and imprisoned for his part in a robbery in which a man was
killed. The book's success overshadowed a better work published the
previous year, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel
Sellt Jar YOII
Yesterday,
and did more to establish Wideman as a literary novelty -
gifted writer from checkered family - than as a major American literary
figure.
In 1990 Wideman again won the PEN/Faulkner Award - the only
American writer to win it twice - for
Philadelphia Fire.
Based loosely on
the calamitous 1985 bombing of the marginally Afrocentric MOVE
group in West Philadelphia,
Fire
was Wideman's first book inspired
largely by what might be called prevailing literary and political condi–
tions. The novel is a bluesy and operatic
tOllr de Jorce,
a fragmented
postmodern docufiction that samples interwoven strands of African–
American disgust and disappointment from the post-Civil Rights period
to the middle of the Reagan era. Probing the fragile inner voice of a
self- exiled writer who returns to America
to
try and understand the mo-
