Any American fiction writer who sets the bulk of his work in the same place, or who draws repeatedly on the same characters, inevitably faces comparison with William Faulkner. With John Edgar Wideman's inner-city Pittsburgh neighborhood of Homewood that comparison is particularly apt, though not for those simple reasons alone.

It is appropriate because the stretched-to-the-breaking-point syntax with which Mr. Wideman captures his characters' inner lives seems at times an echo of Faulknerese. It is appropriate because both are concerned with the life of a community over time. It is appropriate because they both have a feel for the anecdotal folklore through which a community defines itself, because they both often choose to present their characters in the act of telling stories, and because in drawing on that oral tradition they both write as their characters speak, in a language whose pith and vigor has not yet been worn into cliché. A basketball in Mr. Wideman's “Doc's Story” drops through a hoop “clean as new money”; a child in his “Everybody Knew Bubba Riff” gets asked if he has “got teeth in them feet boy chewing out the toes of your shoes.”

The comparison seems appropriate, too, because Mr. Wideman, like Faulkner, is better at creating a whole imagined world than at creating individual pieces of fiction. The Stories of John Edgar Wideman contains two earlier collections, Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories] (1989) and Damballah (1981), along with 10 new pieces grouped under the title All Stories Are True. “Damballah” was the first of Mr. Wideman's Homewood books, a group that includes his novel Sent for You Yesterday (1983), his memoir Brothers and Keepers (1984) and most of his short fiction. It contains a set of linked stories about the family of John French (the name of Mr. Wideman's maternal grandfather), and it is stronger as a whole than in any of its individual pieces. But those stories do stand as separate works—I can imagine reading them one by one in magazines and coming away satisfied.

That is not true of Mr. Wideman's newer and more explicitly autobiographical work. The richest pieces in All Stories Are True seem like jagged fragments ripped from a whole—deliberately rough-edged, in terms of both their material and their finish. “Backseat” starts with Mr. Wideman's memories of a former girlfriend whom he sees when he returns to Homewood for his grandmother's funeral. But it then slices back into his family's past: his grandmother cooking in the white folks' kitchen; her four husbands, two of them preachers; an uncle lost in World War II; a brother “in the joint” who has become a Muslim. But what binds that history to Mr. Wideman's memories of teen-age love in the back seat of the rusty car parked in his grandmother's backyard? The only thing holding the pieces of the story together is the associational power of memory. Page by page the story provides a superb rendering of moment-by-moment experience. As you read, that seems enough; finish it and you want something more.

Or do you? Put “Backseat” next to another visit to Homewood, recorded in the title piece of All Stories Are True, next to Mr. Wideman's mother talking on the front porch, remembering an old preacher at Homewood A.M.E. Zion, “black as coal and that's the color of everything he preached. Like his voice tar-brushed the Bible.” And as you read you begin to collate the two stories with each other, and both of them with other stories in this volume. They reinforce one another, slowly building up an image of a place, of a world—street corners, playground basketball, churches, bars and stores and street vendors and ever-branching family trees.

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The more you read John Edgar Wideman, the more impressive he seems. And I suspect that as he has accumulated this body of work—and especially since Brothers and Keepers revealed how heavily he has drawn on his own family's past—he has come increasingly to loosen the structure of individual pieces, allowing himself a kind of open-ended irresolution, as if to suggest that nothing is ever really finished. That is risky, and it makes me suspect that new readers will at first find Mr. Wideman's work confusing, in much the same way as one's first taste of Faulkner can seem bewildering. But to my mind the rewards of his work more than repay the initial effort.

As a kind of odd corollary, the least impressive of Mr. Wideman's recent stories are those meant to stand on their own, bravura set pieces like “Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies,” or “Signs,” about a young teacher's experience with anonymous racist hate mail. They are vivid enough, but they seem thin, tight, written to make a point. An exception is “Everybody Knows Bubba Riff,” a story done in a single unpunctuated sentence, a melody tossed from instrument to instrument, voice to voice, as mourners file past the casket of a young street hustler: “Bubba go down just like anybody else you bust a cap in his chest no man the word on the set is nobody knows who did it. …” It is the choral voice of Homewood.

Mr. Wideman has arranged his work in reverse chronological order, and so in reading one seems to go back in time, back into a more innocent past. Part of that is historical. The earlier stories tend to deal with Mr. Wideman's parents and grandparents; the distance from their time to the present can be suggested by comparing the disbelief with which the characters in “Damballah” react to finding a baby in a trash can with the world beyond the end of outrage in “Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies.”

But the increasing anguish of Mr. Wideman's landscape seems to grow from a steadily darkening personal vision as well. The Stories of John Edgar Wideman is a rich collection. And as I write that, I am aware of the irony in my saying so, for much of what makes this collection so rich is its account of the pain and despair of the dead-end streets of America's cities. But it is also rich in language and the imaginative resourcefulness that can give one the strength to bear that pain.

Merle Rubin (excerpt date 10 July 1992)

[In the following excerpt, Rubin offers a laudatory review of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman.]

For those who feel too pressured to read much fiction throughout the rest of the year, summer brings the time and leisure to settle down on the beach or in the backyard and lose yourself in the world of a writer's imagination.

The new collection of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman includes all the stories he has thus far written: those from his two previous collections (Damballah and Fever) [Fever: Twelve Stories], plus 11 new ones under the heading All Stories Are True.

Although most of Wideman's work is rooted in Homewood, the black section of his native Pittsburgh of which he writes so vividly and passionately, his range of style, form, and subject matter goes beyond that. “What He Saw” takes readers to a black township in South Africa, where a group of visiting journalists confront not only the violence and suffering they see, but questions about their own responsibility in choosing what to report.

“Hostages” ponders contemporary political issues and the value of human life. And “Surfiction” is a slyly entertaining parody of postmodern criticism in which Wideman mocks the antics of its high priests and his own previous susceptibility to them: “Which list,” as he remarks at one point, “further discloses a startling coincidence or perhaps the making of a scandal—one man working both sides of the Atlantic as a writer and critic explaining and praising his fiction as he creates it: Barth Barthes Barthelme.”

Still, the heart of this collection is Homewood, and the characters based on Wideman's family, friends, and neighbors. It's a tough, raunchy world of appealing little boys who too often grow up to be swaggering bad guys, whose misguided need to play out a role lands them in prison; a world of devoted, loving mothers and quietly dignified grandmothers who have lived through experiences too powerful to put into words. But Wideman puts it all into words: slangy, elegant, harsh, tender, funny, angry, and eloquent.