Black writing in the United States is in full reaction against the psychological realism and apocalyptic fantasies of the 1960s that were a form of bringing news from the other, hidden, hip side of town. It is most commonly expressed as a matter of audience, alternative discourse, reclaiming black history, control of the word, or a return to black communal values now that humanism's mask of universality has been seen through. Hence the slyly innocent fabulations of Toni Morrison, or the outrageous historical revisionism of Ishmael Reed. The wish to be rid of the burden of being both artist and apostle of integration has defined black American writing since James Baldwin's pot-boilers. The impulse to look to what is considered authentic black life is hardly new, but it has come in phases since the Harlem Renaissance. Protest alternates with going back to the roots. In his day, Richard Wright expressed it as a class division, a choice between middle-class faiths and the “formless folk utterance”, the “sensualization” of suffering among the black masses.

Born in 1941, John Edgar Wideman, now a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, became a Rhodes Scholar, and then put in his time at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His early books—the first appeared in 1967—were very much in the mood of urban despair, but since then Wideman has accommodated the aesthetic of affirmation. Heavy with a sense of purpose, solemn in its evocation of the black family, mystical toward the black community (specifically Homewood, in his native Pittsburgh), Wideman's fiction has little humour and he is not greatly interested in what pleasure a reader may derive before he declares the circle of blood ties and racial bonds “unbroken”. He turns black speech into a difficult literary style.

Wideman suffers from a wish to prove that he can be both poetic and funky. “Claim the turf, wear it like a badge, yet keep my distance, be of the street but not in it.” Not one to overlook a single odour in the “stink of spring”, Wideman frequently enjoys unsavoury images, such as “he often felt like one of those huge, ugly pimples that sprouted regularly on his face. Sore to the touch, begging to be busted. … Anybody looked at him knew he was full of white, nasty pus.” But he is earnest about the pedigree of the narrative strategies he employs, a self-conscious combination of European modernism, the black oral tradition, and, most recently, the atmosphere of deconstruction and canon-bashing closing in on black academic judgments. The method that brought on the uncreated life of Dublin or Mississippi has, in Wideman's work, fitful licence, but the bill always comes due, the question of how well symbolism and stream of consciousness have been put to use. Wideman accepts the risks of his models, including the tendency to sink into art prose and pseudo-philosophical blather. The interest of his work lies not in its anxious design or ponderous surface meaning, but in the shifting sociology of attitudes. Every book is an elaborate vessel in which social truths about black urban life are buried.

Philadelphia Fire, Wideman's most recent novel, is based on the police action in 1985 against a small collective, Move, that advocated, among many things, destruction of “the system”. A police helicopter dropped a bomb on the roof of the fortified house occupied by Move, igniting drums of gasoline stored inside. Eleven members of the collective, five of them children, were killed, scores of homes were destroyed in the fire that burned out of control, and the damage in the neighbourhood was widespread. The mayor at that time was black, but, as Kathleen Cleaver has noted, Move's conflict with the police began with another bloody siege in 1978, and the manner in which the city responded to the later crisis had a great deal to do with the harsh way in which the police generally treated the black poor.

Wideman's novel is concerned with the aftermath of the conflagration. Cudjoe, a writer, ends his ten years of expatriate life on Mykonos to search for the boy who, in his version at least, was seen escaping the burning house. Characters float in and out: a woman who was an early member of the collective, a former classmate who cynically enjoys being part of the black administration. There are other voices: the child in the fire itself; a derelict who witnesses a suicidal leap from an office window and is later set on fire by marauding kids; and a member of a youth gang, Kaliban's Kiddie Korps, that has access to Uzis—“Money Power Things” is its slogan. But Cudjoe does very little investigation into the Move incident, so distracted is he by reflections on his easy life in Greece, his earlier life with his white wife, a string of sad visits to a former writing professor on Long Island, and the loss of 1960s idealism, and by regrets for his trusting pupils, a group of black children he helped to prepare for their park production of The Tempest that was rained out, whom he told:

De rail de tale. Disembarrass, disabuse, disburden—demonstrate conclusively that Mr Caliban's behind is clean and unencumbered, good as anybody else's. That the tail was a tale. Nothing more or less than an ill-intentioned big fat lie. And that when all is said and done, sound and fury separated with Euclidean niceness, with Derridian diddley-bop from the mess that signifies nothing, what you discover is the one with the tail was old mean landlord Mr prosperous Prospero who wielded without thought of God or man the merry ole cat-o'-nine-tails unmercifully whupping on your behind and still would be performing his convincing imitation of Simon Legree, of the beast this very moment, in this very classroom, cutting up, cutting down, laying on the stripes, if it weren't for me.

Critical commonplaces such as this abound in the novel as Cudjoe, accompanied by refrains from the poetry of Robert Hayden, a hit song by Aretha Franklin, and many other high and low cultural references, roams through the city, a journalist killing time, rediscovering the scenes of his youth and stumbling across those who stayed behind. The emphasis is not on the lives of black people in the city, but rather on their opposition to what city life in the US has become. “If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back … then Cudjoe is deep within the giant's stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh.” Finally, at a memorial service for the Move bombing, Cudjoe is confronted by the ghosts of blacks who were beaten at an Independence Day rally in 1805.

In Philadelphia Fire, the random and institutional violence in the city, the low regard for life among the young, the cynicism and helplessness, transform the positive black perspective of holding on, “the story he must never stop singing”, into the saddest of consolations. Disorganized, fractured, inchoate, Wideman's parable about lost children and how adults have ruined the world for the young attempts too much. “Poison works its way through their veins into their brains.” The source of the misery is clarified in an essay inserted in the middle of the book that deals with another real life-tragedy: Wideman's younger son currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his room-mate on a camping field trip when he was sixteen. “To take stock, to make sense, to attempt to control or to write a narrative of self—how hopeless any of these tasks must seem when the self attempting this harrowing business is no more than a shadow.”

In his recent flattering study of Wideman's work, Blackness and Modernism, James Coleman sees the “Homewood trilogy”—Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983)—as showing that Wideman matured beyond the “pessimistic modernist worldview” and developed “a more positive black perspective”, but it is not clear what this amounts to, apart from the right to combine semantic opportunism about black history with a sense of he-found-in-stones-the-sermons-he-had-already-hidden-there.

Perhaps it is a relief for Wideman to explore the world of “touching, laughing, suffering black people”, given the distance from his family that his education and ambition entailed, a distance he tried to depict in his earlier work and later referred to in terms of having learned to identify with stories from the black neighbourhood. In his Homewood fictions a prodigal son usually makes an appearance, either a son whose formality distinguishes him from his methadone-maintained uncle in the bar, or a son who wants to let go and dance. “What seems to ramble”, Wideman reassures us, “begins to cohere when the listener understands the process, understands that the voice seeks to recover everything, that the voice proclaims nothing is lost, that the listener is not passive but lives like everything else within the story.”

The Homewood that Wideman chronicles and cherishes is the setting for a family saga, complete with “A Begat Chart”. One's relations, as subject-matter, arrive ready-made with their facial characteristics and deep secrets. Everyone who writes about his background is bound to give a terrific spin to what is remembered or invented. But, instead of assuming archetypal proportions, Wideman's family members come across as caricatures. Either way there is a debilitating certainty that the wounded old lady hermit on the hill in Hiding Place will talk exactly like one, that the hustler who seeks refuge with her from the cops will speak as a hustler, that in Sent for You Yesterday the husband scuffling for his family will talk like a real man, with the forgivable masculine faults of drinking and gambling, and that his rogue piano-playing friend will answer with the traditional reckless virtue of the black musician about to be sacrificed in a hail of bullets. The inner monologues have a theatrical tone because they must live up to the reputation of black expression. The stories that Wideman transcribes or re-creates never shed their sense of being treasures brought down from the attic, shared on special occasions. Their value is that they exist, that their primary means of transmission borders on performance.

What would be moving on its own is obscured by Wideman's schematic interpretations, by a layering intended to reveal profundity. And his favourite metaphor for intense emotion is the rather perfunctory one of the scream, the scream behind a man's eyes, the scream chewing up a woman's lips. The literary ornamentation is unfortunate because Wideman has a genuine feeling for ghetto life, as demonstrated by the romanticism with which he writes about basketball, that totemic sport of the ghetto. There is nothing he doesn't know about the game, the delicacy of the moves, the rules of the school lot contests, the etiquette of hanging out on the side-lines, the music in the parks. At university, basketball was his identity and his refuge. Similarly, in Wideman there is more about the legacy of Vietnam, the damaged returning veteran, than one generally finds in contemporary black fiction.

Mostly, however, Wideman embellishes the lives of the working poor, the bitterness of sitting on a stoop every morning and waiting to be chosen for a job as a paper-hanger and resentment at being the wrong side of the tracks. Why black men from the ghetto get a certain look in their eyes and give up is a social truth that has been nearly lost in a turning inward upon the riches of belonging—a change accelerated by the impact of feminism on black writing. In Gayl Jones's novels of the 1970s, Corregidora and Eva's Man, there was no white side of town. This seemed, then, as original as her gift for vernacular speech and the boldness with which she treated matters between black men and black women. But the subsequent feminist extremes, culminating in Alice Walker's discovery of the goddess within her, combating the excesses of black manhood, distracted from the enduring problem of blacks in the general society.

Claude Brown, in Manchild in the Promised Land, was frank about the contempt his generation of hoodlums had for what they saw as the back-country, downtrodden ways of their parents. The break between generations was taken for granted when Brown was writing in the early 1960s. Brothers and Keepers (1985) helps to explain why Wideman attempts, almost as a pastoral mission, to compensate for this break in the urgent desire to bear witness, to prove the spiritual kinship of the present with the past and restore a kind of pride of ownership. It is as though he wanted to give something back to his immediate family because the attrition of years has taken away so much. So many of the stories and figures in Brothers and Keepers have been met before that it reads like a concordance to the Homewood trilogy. Though the book depends on Wideman's eclectic style, it is a non-fiction account of his relationship with his younger brother, who, involved in a robbery in 1975 during which a man was killed, was sentenced to life in prison.

Wideman discusses the brutality of the penal system and the effects of hard time, “a death by inches”, but what drives the book is how their lives diverged, what drew his brother to the life of the addict, thief and absentee father while he entered the “square world” of professional status, marriage to a white woman, and children in the back of the station wagon. Wideman takes himself to task for staking too much of what he was on what he would become, for looking forward to the day when he could look down on Homewood, and for merely teaching books about black consciousness in the quiet of the classroom while his brother was living it in the “real world”. In trying to come to terms with the waste, he reaches to define his brother as a rebel, one of the young black men of the 1960s who had “dynamite growing out of their skulls”.

Wideman confesses that he was embarrassed when his brother loudly sang along to a soul radio station in front of his white wife. In a previous book, Wideman had admitted to his brother in the preface that as a child he was reluctant to be seen enjoying watermelon from fear that to do so would mark him as an “instant nigger”, “black and drippy lipped”. It is as though Wideman must pay for the shame he once felt at his working-class roots by fervently embracing a concept of blackness “that would come to rest in the eyes; blackness a way of seeing and being seen”, much like one of his characters who thinks that having a string of babies by a number of men is a liberation from the notion that “crossing t's and dotting i's had something to do with becoming a human being and blackness was the chaos you had to whip into shape in order to be a person who counted”.

Motivated by family tragedy, Wideman corrected his assumptions. But, as it turned out, this embrace could be reduced to an abstraction by real-life events in your own safe back yard. His brother's case, then that of his son—the irony is not that the curse of the ghetto followed Wideman into his middle-class exile. The meaning, if there is one, is that trouble is arbitrary, indiscriminate; or that the two Americas are not as far apart as we like to think, or that disorder does not depend on class.

To find a Wideman black character not only jogging through a white neighbourhood or cleaning a former concentration camp victim's apartment, but also seen externally, from a white point of view, is, oddly enough, refreshing. The range of characters in his recent collection of stories, Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories], is agreeably broad, the situations are carefully realized; the short story is perhaps Wideman's true form. One story about basketball says more about black life than all his previous novels combined. But when not building around a specific encounter or inhabiting a particular voice, he indulges in academic exercises, texts rubbing against texts as if they were petals that could be bruised until they yielded the perfume of opaquely African values.

The question of how he once equated the black world with inferiority and entrance into the white world with salvation is not addressed, except by implication: that he was listening to the wrong cultural channels, that black life then didn't strike him as particularly nourishing. The change of heart was more than prepared for by the cultural climate. The dialect that carried a certain stigma in the days of Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Blues ethos that Langston Hughes defended, and the attention to black folklore of which Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneer, are part of the ascendant aesthetic. What had been portrayed as marginal, exotic, or local colour has been, for some time now, the proud orthodoxy foreordained by history. The difference between then and now is the trendiness and careerism of it all.