[Birkerts is a noted critic and author of several books, including The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1995). In the following review, he offers a negative appraisal of The Cattle Killing.]

In August 1793, an epidemic of yellow fever broke out in Philadelphia. Chaos prevailed. Doctors (including Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence) struggled for cure and containment. The rich either barricaded themselves in their houses or fled, while the less fortunate shifted for themselves. There was widespread looting. What better test for the City of Brotherly Love?

The novelist and short-story writer John Edgar Wideman has had a longstanding interest both in Philadelphia and in this particular historical moment. His previous novel, Philadelphia Fire, applied a collage technique to various events leading toward and away from the 1985 Move bombings, laying down severe indictments on both sides of the color line. And the title story of his 1989 collection. Fever, offered up a fragmented documentary account of the 18th-century epidemic. Now, with his latest novel. Mr. Wideman looks to give that historical material a more symphonic treatment. But symphonic in the modern, not classical, style—structurally intricate, with jagged rushes of episodic prose, abrupt tonal shifts and few of the harmonic comforts most readers expect.

The Cattle Killing recounts in quasivisionary style the fraught wanderings of the unnamed narrator (though other voices also intrude), who is a young black preacher determined to help his people. These are the fever days, and he is either abroad in the countryside outside Philadelphia or else in the cauldron itself, serving as emissary between the prominent black bishop Richard Allen and Dr. Rush (here called Dr. Thrush). A good part of the narrative comes to use in the form of stories the preacher tells to an unnamed woman (possibly Thrush's black maid, Kathryn, who lies abed, pregnant, and appears to be afflicted with the fever). Other portions are given in diary from by Thrush's wife, a cultivated blind woman who must dictate her thoughts to Kathryn.

Plot is not the point. Stories, memories and visions bleed together in the narrator's stricken soul. An epileptic, he finds himself torn asunder by apocalyptic, then beatific, visitations. At one moment, early on, he is in St. Matthew's, a predominantly white church, sitting in the back pews with the few black congregation members; in the next, he feels "a hideous dragon, red-eyed, scaly, lumbering toward the church." Mr. Wideman sets the following passage in the third person: "St. Matthew's wooden walls turn down like Jericho's walls of stone, like pages of a book, opening upon a fantastical landscape. He could see as far as the ends of the earth in every direction … The miracle was that near and far had become interchangeable. Things close at hand, things separated from him by a continent, were blended. One. He roamed everywhere at once. At any moment exactly where he needed to be."

But this is a vision—and the language and imagery of a vision. What the narrator encounters is confusion and delirium: rich whites sending their servants out to die for them or using them (Dr. Thrush coming to Kathryn's cot in the night); villagers burning down the house of the preacher's employers, a mixed-race couple, for their sin of miscegenation. The reader, hurtled along by Mr. Wideman's impressionistic sequences, often feels a craving for clarity. Do the flashes of events, the strange chunks of tales recounted, matter in themselves? Or are they just grist for the grinding stones of metaphor?

Mr. Wideman presides over his narrative materials like a jazzed-up Ovid. Everything is in flux, becoming—or echoing—something else. Early in his wanderings, for example, the narrator has a hallucinatory encounter with a mysterious black woman who is walking along a road carrying a bundled baby on her hip. African style. It turns out that the child—white-skinned, golden-haired—is dead. Is it hers? Her master's? We don't know.

The narrator follows the woman to the shore of a lake and watches, powerless to act, as she discards her clothing and walks steadily in: "Water rises to her thighs, her waist, covers her breasts, the baby in her arms, water finally closing over the dark glisten of her skull." He waits and waits for her to reappear, but of course she doesn't.

Except, that is, in other guises—in later tales, and in the narrator's own excited speculations. He hears about an incident in which the corpse of a beautiful pregnant African woman was auctioned to the highest bidder. After a seizure, he sees an unknown woman watching him. And then there is the shadowy Kathryn, carrying what may be Dr. Thrush's child. These things tie together, but how? Mr. Wideman is not about to gloss his imagery for us.

No less provocative is the legend of the cattle killing from which the novel takes its title. A voice, we learn, spoke to the Xhosa people long ago in Africa, commanding them to destroy their cattle herds and thus, though sacrifice, insure the coming of a new and better world. Meanwhile, the narrator hears the counsel of his own dream voice: "Beware. Do not kill your cattle. Do not speak with your enemy's tongue. Do not fall asleep in your enemy's dream."

The legend and the narrator's reply set up a powerful metaphorical tension. But how to apply this to the circumstances at hand? Are we to superimpose Africa upon America, cattle killing on epidemic—or 18th-century Philadelphia on the present? At different points in the novel, different messages—the despairing, the visionary—seem equally true. Could that be the point?

Mr. Wideman may have ventured beyond his readers this time out. Whereas figurative elements traditionally serve narrative interests, here things are the other way around. Filaments of story, of precious sense, are woven like bits of rag into a rug of shimmering but also perplexing suggestiveness.

I have not yet mentioned the novel's framing conceits: the opening passage, in which a writer, presumably Mr. Wideman himself, climbs a hill to visit his aging father and read to him from his new work; and the conclusion, in which a son, Dan, writes to his father about his father's manuscript, "Cattle Killing." The reader can contend with only so many textual strata. If there were a statute of restriction on narrative proliferation. John Edgar Wideman would be—flagrantly, brilliantly—in violation.