Wideman, John Edgar - Randall Kenan (review date 1 January 1990)
Randall Kenan (review date 1 January 1990)
SOURCE: Kenan, Randall. “A Most Righteous Prayer.” The Nation 250, no. 1 (1 January 1990): 25-7.
[In the following review, Kenan discusses the defining characteristics of the stories comprising Fever: Twelve Stories.]
“Do not look for straightforward, linear steps from book to book,” wrote John Edgar Wideman in the 1985 preface to his Homewood Trilogy. “Think rather of circles within circles within circles, a stone dropped into a still pool, ripples and wavemotions.” In Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories], Wideman has troubled the water again, refining his already elliptical and dense prose; in the process he has reinvented black English and (re)made it, elegant, suave, as elastic as ever: “Ball be swishing with that good backspin, that good arch bringing it back, blip, blip, blip, three bounces and it's coming right back to Doc's hands like he got a string on the...
[The entire page is 1907 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
