THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411030352
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON
LENGTH: Medium: 92 lines
FATHERALONG
A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
Pantheon Books. 216 pp. $21.
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN is a man who is familiar with tragedy. Although he is a successful writer and a respected teacher, his experiences as a son, brother and father are almost too sad to contemplate. He is a man who has learned that great athletic ability, intelligence and artistic skill cannot stop the world from falling apart around you.
Fatheralong, Wideman's second work of nonfiction, and a 1994 National Book Award nominee, is a fiercely honest attempt to understand the complex relationships between fathers and sons and how, for African Americans, those relationships get entangled in the roots of racism in this country.
Wideman is the author of six novels, a number of short-story collections and the best-selling memoir Brothers and Keepers. He grew up in the impoverished and often violent Homewood section of Pittsburgh, but very early on he determined that the American dream would not elude him as it did so many others around him.
He went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball and received awards for his writing. After he graduated, he went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was 26 when his first novel, A Glance Away, came out, and the other books followed consistently and with due praise.
One critic called him ``the black Faulkner, the softcover Shakespeare,'' and although it's hard to interpret all that such a phrase could mean, it certainly is not faint praise. But all his success has not allowed him to leave the shadow of Homewood or his past behind - to forget a younger brother who was convicted of being an accomplice in a murder in 1976 or an 18-year-old son who confessed to a brutal killing in 1986.
Fatheralong is an attempt to go back to the source; Wideman realizes that our stories are connected to our fathers' stories. To understand one is to make better sense of the other. Wideman's father's story is a sad one but a typical one as well, it seems. He is defined more by his absence than his presence. When he is there, it is often as a silence, a speechlessness.
In Fatheralong Wideman tries to get at those silences between father and son, at ``the trickiness of words, the ownership of words. . . '' Like Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright before him, Wideman ponders the magic of words and stories, the power of language. For his father and himself, it is: ``More unsaid words piling up between us. Words always too clumsy to form the questions I needed him to answer. Questions on hold for years, years during which I seldom saw my father, years thickening the silence.''
In the context of this memoir, Wideman gets the chance to know his father, to travel with him to their ancestral home in South Carolina, to learn more about what made him the man he was. There are evocative moments of narrative in this story, moments that define character better than pages of explanation. When Wideman recounts the story of his son Danny's wedding and his father's missing the service, it is a seriocomic tale of pride and bad luck.
Wideman is at his best when he lets his characters act and speak in the context of the narrative form. In such narratives he tells us with eloquent frankness what we might be afraid to admit: ``You grow old and then you die. Fathers impart this brutal wisdom. The father's body inscribed with messages of change, loss, failure. One of his jobs is to pass on the message willy-nilly, one way or another. Drop it like a bomb, leave it in a basket on the doorstep. He can't always take you with him, but you will follow in his footsteps.''
Wideman is least effective when he takes his subtitle too seriously. He meditates too much, and his conclusions seem a bit twisted by his own tragic experiences. As much as he hates the paradigm of race, he seems unable to escape it himself - implicitly it becomes the explanation for his father, his brother and perhaps all African-American fathers and sons. As he says, ``Race preempts our right to situate our story where we choose. It casts us as minor characters in somebody else's self-elevating melodrama.''
To Wideman's credit, he wishes to find out ``who I might be, who you might be - without it (race).''
Wideman never solves the riddle: He never finds a place where the racial paradigm does not intrude. But this does not, and should not, stop him from searching for an answer, from asking those unasked questions. For, as he says, ``. . . we must speak these stories to one another.'' MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches journalism and English at Old Dominion
University and is the author of ``Imagined Places: Journeys into
Literary America'' and ``A Place That's Known.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
FRED VUICH
John Edgar Wideman, author of ``Fatheralong.''
by CNB