To make writing flow like speech—to make a pool seem like a stream—may be the hardest thing in fiction. For it is the old difficulty of careful dishevelment: to get the drift of speech without too much float, the slop of detail and imprecision without surrendering selection and form, to sound unliterary only by the most literary means.

This is what John Edgar Wideman's stories of African-American speech attempt, and at their worst they can seem too dishevelled and too careful. In Wideman's hands, the traditional narrated short story, that rather prim parishioner, becomes a junction of street-voices (the streets in this case being the black section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood). There are no quotation marks in these stories, and in a sense there is no narrator—just a crowd of voices, with the narrative handed round, like a pipe, from speaker to speaker. Sometimes a new voice appears after each paragraph, sometimes after a page or two. There are lapses, repetitions, refrains. The effect is a kind of sleeplessness, and one reads these stories in a swoon, and sometimes a frenzy, of continuousness.

It feels like a new kind of short-story writing; alas, it must run all the old risks. [In All Stories Are True] Wideman is a bewildering mixture of the brilliant and the ordinary. Homewood—his Dublin, his patch—is a fierce and intricate presence in these stories, a place of hardship and perseverance. But Wideman is not as good at loose oral poetry as, to judge from its dominance in his writing, he must imagine himself to be. Here, for instance, in the title-story, a man recalls his brother, who is in prison.

My brother's arms are prison arms. The kind you see in the street that clue you where a young brother's been spending his time. Bulging biceps, the rippled look of ropy sinews and cords of muscle snaking around the bones. Skinned. Excess flesh boiled away in this cauldron. Must be noisy as a construction site where the weightlifters hang out in the prison yard. Metal clanking. Grunts and groans. Iron pumped till shoulders and chests swell to the bursting point. Men fashioning arms thick enough to wrestle fate, hold off the pressure of walls and bars always bearing down. Large. Big. Nothing else to do all day. Size one measure of time served. Serious time. Bodies honed to stop-time perfection, beyond vulnerability and pain. I see them in their sun-scoured playground sprawled like dazed children.

This is characteristic. It wants to have the pulse of the oral, but is in fact as literary as a sestina, and it is unable to hide its literariness. Those verbs “snaking” and “fashioning”; that word “cauldron”; that very deliberate repetitiveness, so unlike the darting repetitions of speech; the sentimental grandiosity of men “fashioning arms thick enough to wrestle fate”. This is not a man talking, but writing. But then, at the last moment, as Wideman moves from speech to something like conventional narrative, he produces a sudden brilliance: “I see them in their sun-scoured playground sprawled like dazed children”, and one is moved, after the talk of wasted muscularity, by the notion of childishness.

The suspicion grows, as one reads further, that Wideman is at his most literary when attempting to be most “oral”, and that he is most natural when calmly accepting the traditional burdens and formalities of third-person narration. In “Backseat”, he writes autobiographically about the Wideman family in Pittsburgh, and about the death of his grandmother. The story opens with a fine, conventional evocation of lovemaking in the back of a 1946 Lincoln Continental (“We made love in the belly of the whale”). The story makes good, plain progress, until Wideman again attempts his oral stutter, his imitation of a mind at thought, imagining his grandmother in hospital: “Skin and bones. She's down to skin and bone. Wasting away. We thought she'd live forever. She'd be sick, real sick but she always came back. Flesh has deserted her now.” But that last droopy sentence belongs not to thought but to bad adolescent poetry.

Compare Wideman's attempts to the mastery of Toni Morrison's spoken narration. In Beloved, Sethe remembers her life as a slave, her “marriage” to Halle, and her extraordinary makeshift wedding-gown, a patchwork of cloth stolen from her mistress:

The top was from two pillow cases in her mending basket. The front of the skirt was a dresser scarf a candle fell on and burnt a hole in, and one of her old sashes we used to test the flatiron on. Now the back was a problem for the longest time. Seem like I couldn't find a thing that wouldn't be missed right away. … Finally I took the mosquito netting from a nail out the barn. We used it to strain jelly through. … And there I was, in the worst-looking gown you could imagine. Only my wool shawl kept me from looking like a haint pedding. I wasn't but fourteen years old, so I reckon that's why I was so proud of myself.

In place of Wideman's repetitions, Morrison offers something which feels like speech but is also a narrative, driven, detailed and exact.

Yet, for all this, Wideman is worth staying with. He has moments of aeration, sudden openings of natural power. Sometimes these are visual, as when in “Concert”, a man watching a band dressed in black tie sees “how the starched white shirtfronts sever their dark heads. Canonballs dropped in the snow.” Elsewhere, lovely strange words appear: jook, brammed, sassing, splib. More often, the moments of feeling are achieved, as in Dreiser's fiction, in spite of a sluggish language. At the end of the title-story, after much meandering, everything suddenly tightens. We are standing in a prison, and the narrator notices that a leaf is being blown high up over the prison walls. Others notice it, and soon people are cheering: “that leaf had a whole lot of fans when it sailed over the wall. Would have thought people cheering for the Steelers or somebody's lottery number hit. … After watching it a while you know that leaf was flying out of here on its mind. Every little whip and twist and bounce starts to matter. … Whole visiting yard whooping and hollering when it finally blew over the wall.” In a second, Wideman's weaknesses have become virtues: we are pulled along the slow rope of oral narration, but this time without frustration, for a moment of delicacy is building, and we need to feel it grow; above all, Wideman's sentimentality—and this is a sentimental passage—seems courageous, not an excuse.

This book contains stories from three collections (1981, 1989 and 1992). His earlier stories, in particular, those from his first collection, seem to mix formal control and oral raggedness more properly. Many of them are shaped towards such moments, episodes when an entire story is suddenly illuminated; but it seems a shame that the reader must, as it were, stay up all night for these daylight gleams.