[Seymour is an American journalist, editor, and author of such works as Jazz: The Great American Art. In the following review, he reflects on the absence of imagination in modern society and responds favorably to Wideman's treatment of the subject in The Cattle Killing.]

Dream is dead. I should have known about it sooner, but I rarely bought the Sandman comic book in separate installments, preferring the bigger, glossier compilations. So it was only when I read The Kindly Ones (DC Comics Vertigo), which appears to be the final collection of stories from Neil Gaiman's extraordinary graphic fantasy series, that I found out that Dream—a k a Sandman, Lord Morpheus—had ceased to be. Worse, there isn't much left of Morpheus's kingdom except the corpses of his loyal followers and a tender-hearted raven named Matthew, his lone surviving acolyte, Meanwhile, Dream's godlike siblings roam the Superhighway of the Subconscious. Gaiman, after all, calls them the Endless. Among their number are Desire, Destruction, Delirium and, sexiest and sweetest of all, Death herself.

Whatever Gaiman's reasons for finishing off his pale, sad hero, it seems both appropriate and redundant for Dream to have checked out at Millennium Minus Four and Counting. The very notion of artful dreaming has wandered into a dead zone. The movies no longer try to be subtle about ransacking and recycling their past for the quick buck. Music appropriates used riffs and discarded motifs and tags the result "sampling" or "postmodern." The television networks don't know whether they're cloning Friends or The X-Files. Scheherazade's ability to make stuff up out of thin air seems just beyond the reach of premillennial storytellers. If imagination isn't as dead as Gaiman's Dream Lord, it's been gravely ill for some time now.

Don't take my word for it. Ask John Edgar Wideman. Through style and content, Wideman has made it his calling—really his burden—to chart deficiencies in imagination, both collective and individual. Because Wideman is an engaged, highly visible black writer in twentieth-century America, readers assume that racism, not imagination sickness, drives his work. But what is racism, after all, but a breakdown of the imagination? If you can't imagine properly, you can't empathize and if you can't empathize, you can't see whomever you choose to disdain/dismiss/hate as being connected with your own fate. In a piece written for Esquire about the riots that followed acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King, Wideman deems this inability to connect "the peculiar and perhaps fatal American violence." This sounds like a simple assessment from a mind as complex as Wideman's. But if it's so simple, why can't the nation figure out anything else to do with its terminal disfigurement of the imagination except cloak it with cosmetics or (for those times when it thinks such deformity is dashing), wear it like a battle scar? Radical surgery? Wouldn't hear of it. Sounds like it would hurt too much. Rest assured, replies Dr. Wideman, the surgeon of dreams, the longer you wait, the more it will hurt.

As a public figure, Wideman offers credulity one of its more formidable challenges. Even the publication of thirteen books in thirty years can't diminish the sheer wonder of his presence. It makes your eyes grow big to think that this product of Pittsburgh's mean streets could hit the books as hard as he nailed jump shots for the University of Pennsylvania and so was able to secure all—Ivy League status and a Rhodes scholarship. And then there's the body of work, breathtaking in its thematic sweep and stylistic reach, haunting in its penchant for richly detailed memory music and nerves rubbed raw by injustice. His memoirs, Brothers and Keepers (1984) and Fatheralong (1994), offer eloquent testimony to the personal travails he had to overcome while tending to his literary calling: first a brother behind bars, then a son. How can anyone stay focused—much less patient or decent—in the face of such calamity?

In chronicling America's failure to connect, Wideman himself has struggled to connect with a mainstream African-American reading audience. But, as is the case with fellow Modernist dream masters like Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Ornette Coleman and any Abstract Expressionist you can name, Wideman demands that his readers work with him in making connections, drawing conclusions, following the map of his characters' souls. The odds against him are grim. One of the worst symptoms of the prevailing imagination-illness is the reader/listener/watcher's refusal to be anything but a passive receptacle for predigested information. Still, Wideman keeps on keeping on. The Cattle Killing is the latest and, quite possibly, greatest testament to his heroic struggle against imagination sickness.

The success of Wideman's Homewood trilogy—Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983)—tempts the critic to group the rest of his novels into cycles and shared themes. In the case of The Cattle Killing, you have to go back to A Glance Away (1967) to find a primordial link. In that first novel, Wideman navigates the distance separating the tormented consciences of a young black recovering drug addict and a middle-aged white college professor. While Wideman's manipulation of these two lost souls toward a climactic barroom encounter doesn't quite convince, his eye and ear were already receiving magical signals that he then transmitted through a lush, allusive style. Wideman's erudition got the best of him in his second novel, Hurry Home (1970), however bravely the book confronted the division between its black lawyer protagonist's working-class roots and his leisure-class aspirations. The Penn sharpshooter was better off developing his empathic footwork instead of dribbling dualities; The Lynchers (1972), a tale of young black activists seeking vengeance on a white policeman, was the strongest demonstration thus far of his ability to immerse himself in dreams and nightmares different from his own.

The Homewood trilogy offered Wideman a chance to kick back with a trip home to the legends, mysteries and myths of his Pittsburgh neighborhood. The journey galvanized his narrative powers, broadened his expressive range, allowed him to internalize to a greater degree the healing power of telling stories. It seemed also to give him the psychic foundation to confront the myriad personal and public demons unearthed in Philadelphia Fire (1990), an impressionistic novel that uses the 1985 MOVE bombing as a basis to continue the enquiry of values begun with A Glance Away and continued through The Lynchers—and, for that matter, the two memoirs. In each of these books, Wideman melds his consciousness with those of disparate blacks and whites as if the act of dreaming their dreams would somehow inoculate his readers against cowardice and dread of each other.

The Cattle Killing is set in Philadelphia where, it seems, Wideman's muse is most agitated by society's disfigurement. It begins inside the head of a black novelist who processes images of the city as is now and as it was when he was growing up. The writer's reveries of his mother warning him of dangers lurking in his old neighborhood are crushed by the weight of present-day shootings of teenagers:

Shoot. Chute. Black boys shoot each other. Murder themselves, Shoot. Chute. Panicked cattle funneled down the killing chute, nose pressed in the drippy ass of the one ahead. Shitting and pissing all over themselves because finally, too late, they understand. Understand whose skull is split by the ax at the end of the tunnel.

Like one of the Dream Lord's emissaries, the novelist is directed toward a corollary nightmare of self-destruction: the long-ago while of the South African Xhosa people who ritually destroyed their precious cattle because some jive prophecy told them it would drive the marauding Europeans from their land. Having thus established that dreams can deceive as surely as they can heal, Wideman makes his novelist dream his way back to 1793. A plague is sweeping through the City of Brotherly Love, giving its white citizens feverish delusions that the pestilence is the sinister work of the blacks in their midst, who are themselves immune. Bearing witness to this madness is a young itinerant minister of mixed racial origins who, with his now lost-and-presumed-dead-at-sea brother, freed his mother from slavery. He wanders about, working at odd jobs, preaching the Gospel. His faith, however sturdy, cannot protect him from the perils of a landscape agitated by disease and race hate. Even the preacher's fine mind betrays him with sudden, spectacular seizures that leave him reeling from shining horrific visions of fire and tumult before giving way to "a starting clarity of vision" and inner peace.

One hot afternoon, the preacher sees—what? "Perhaps a trick of the sun…. Perhaps a mote of dust in my eye or a drop of sweat glued to my lashes." The apparition assumes the voluptuous shape of an African woman cradling a package. She appears to the wanderer in fragments. He can't stop staring at her foot:

A delicate foot, poorly served by rough, rural paths. An indoor foot, a foot for silk slippers or soft leather boots with raised heels and many buttons. A foot weeping now. Soot-streaked, bloody tears, and I wished for a basin of cool water in my sack. I wanted to kneel beside her, bathe away the misery, listen to her recite the tale of her misfortune.

A little later, he's certain the feet are made of wood. He is also certain that the bundle she carries is a dead white child she insists on bathing. He can't help himself. He must follow them, offer them charitable, assuring words that, to his horror, cannot stop them from being swallowed by a lake. What is this? One of his apocalyptic visions, only this one in slow motion? He remembers seeing the woman once before; her image is associated with his visits to a community of black worshipers and to the home of an older interracial couple, posing as mistress and slave. The minister witnesses their slaughter by white mobs afflicted with the plague-related racist delusion, but not before he hears their stories, the dreams they use to immunize themselves against the visions that trap others.

Ghosts, Ritual sacrifice. Nightmares of racist retribution. It does appear as if Wideman is playing with chord changes set down by Morrison's Beloved. His narrative bends and curves in the same willfully elliptical manner. You're pressed to keep up with the shifting points of view, the morphing of dream and reality, past and present. Wideman also leaves many questions in his path, among the biggest being the exact nature of his tale. Is this a story of a heroic quest? Is it a detective story with multiple solutions? You're better off recognizing that you inhabit a dreamscape where belief itself—in God, in science, even in imagination—is constantly challenged. Real-life eighteenth-century luminaries like the British painter George Stubbs, the American physician Benjamin Thrush and, most vividly, the African-American religious leader Richard Allen appear in the novel, their Enlightenment-forged certainties upset by such random insanities as recreational dissections of human corpses, bloodletting and always, the tyrannical absurdity of racism itself.

What keeps this phantasmagoria under control is Wideman's style. As always, he leads with his learning, empathy and elegance. But there's something different here: a more focused energy, language that is lean, taut and alive. You smell the rooms, the terrain, the blood, sweat and dread of his characters. That his story asks more questions than it answers should not be confused with evasiveness or showing off. If anything, there's more urgency in Wideman's questions than there is in anyone else's answers. And how good are answers anyway if they resemble the prophecy that doomed the Xhosa's cattle? Or made Philadelphians strike back at the innocent of color? Or, for that matter, make otherwise rational people believe that you can save poor children by obliterating their safety net?

Like melancholy Morpheus, now dead and gone, Wideman knows where dreaming can go wrong. Yet when his book winds back to the contemporary novelist's head, there is a moment of oblique serendipity that redeems imagination's power. The conclusion offers a faint shimmer of hope. Or is hope itself just another bogus vision luring us into deep, unruly waters?

By the way, did I mention that there was a child in the last chapter of The Kindly Ones who may or may not be Morpheus reborn? Maybe it's not important….