[West is an author and critic. The following is his highly favorable review of The Cattle Killing.]

One of the men within John Edgar Wideman believes that over the centuries irreparable harm has been done to the black race, and he agonizes over this in his eight novels. Another Wideman, the thinker and scholar, is the Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Rhodes Scholar and two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award. A third Wideman is the lyrical novelist, a stylist dedicated to reverie and musing, little concerned with plot or continuity, almost a symbolist. His novels fuse these simultaneous selves in varying ways and by now compose a shimmering collection. Few American novelists offer a mix this complex or satisfying, and Wideman's new novel gives us more of the same.

Let me explain. At the center of The Cattle Killing is an itinerant 18th-century black preacher in Philadelphia, a Tiresias figure who speaks from the dead center of the racial mess, sweeping the horizon with a glass that takes in not only America but South Africa and Europe. If slavery is an index to the inevitable decline and fall of Western civilization, this guy is its Spengler, but he has help is telling that story from both Wideman the savant and Wideman the aesthete. George Stubbs, the English painter of flayed horses, supplies Wideman with a central metaphor for the peeling away of nature's layers until, presto, you have the core: Misery is either the product of original sin or of deus absconditus ("the hidden god," the god of deists).

Wideman's clerical man tries to peel away the successive layers of racism, wondering all the time, while he preaches authoritatively to others, where and why humanity went wrong. This fellow's physical and mental meandering comes to us in a disjointed, allusive, tangential voice—more like one part in a Bach cantata than the all-knowing voice of a traditional narrator.

This is Wideman's way, almost a kind of impulsive prose cubism you have to get used to even while he is describing sex, landscape or weather, all of which he does with a fresh, passionate eye.

Since the heart of this book is mystical, it is worth pointing out that Wideman deftly solves the old problem of the mystic: If you dilute an experience to make it accessible, it will not seem special. If you don't, it will be beyond everyone. This is a book pitched between an image—the Xhosa people, who ritually destroyed their cattle so as to defy European domination—and an idea right out of Andre Malraux's The Walnut Trees of Altenburg: "What is a man?" A man, in this case, both destroys his herd and narrates this story, assigning the one back to God and offering the other to his father.

There are some engaging sections here about snow, Josiah Wedgewood, Hottentots, levitation, black women in childbirth, "Ebo melancholy," sperm in bathwater, the "soft, dumb weight" of the scrotum—about wanting "every word of a new book to be a warning, to be saturated with the image of a devastated landscape." Wideman has an ample, well-stocked mind crowded with saliences, included here sometimes without benefit of definite or indefinite article or even verb, to be left as they are, foreshortened or developed in the reader's mind ad lib.

Addressed to Clio, the muse of history, The Cattle Killing is an intensely personal work that encourages us to fill in the blanks as we go. John Edgar Wideman writes from a vulnerable heart with an educated, worldly compassion that is bound to leave a scar.