| Author | Message | ||
     kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 443 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
I know, I know....I can't stand John Edgar Wideman. But I love his new book, GOD'S GYM. He is a truly gifted, masterful writer and I'm quite impressed by the artistry of this newest collection. I read it in one night. You MUST buy a copy if you like great literature with a revelant vibe. I still can't stand WIDEMAN, though. __________________  REVIEW: No American writer dribbles a sentence quite like John Edgar Wideman. Watching him thread language between his legs and around the back is a bit like watching a Harlem Globetrotter vamp. See it a few times and you can forget how much skill is involved. There is one opponent Wideman cannot shake with this dance, and that is life itself. During the past two decades Wideman has given us three memoirs about events that have indelibly marked him -- the life imprisonment of his younger brother Robby (Brothers and Keepers) and the life imprisonment of his son, Jacob (Fatheralong). A nephew was also murdered. (Wideman's novel Two Cities is dedicated to him.) And so, although he graduated from an Ivy League school, became a Rhodes Scholar, taught at fine universities and became the only American writer to twice win the PEN/Faulkner Prize, John Edgar Wideman has remained intimate with the cancers of violence, drug use and institutionalized poverty that afflict the African-American community. God's Gym, Wideman's latest dazzling collection of short fiction, reveals what happens when a writer of such prodigious facility wrestles with the demon of storytelling itself. Why does he tell these stories? What solace will they provide if they cannot alleviate his loved ones of the pain they have experienced? And so, readers used to short fiction coming from a safe remove ought to be forewarned: God's Gym is close to the bone. In "Weight," a narrator tries to write his way into his mother's mind through her body and discovers she is suddenly talking back, irritated by being used in fiction. "That's what upset you, wasn't it," the narrator quips. "Saying goodbye to you. Practicing for your death in a story." "Hunters" begins as a story about a drive-by shooting and then unfolds into a tale about a man relaying that incident back to us, critiquing his own telling of it. This kind of doubling occurs throughout God's Gym, and it's never distracting, in part because it's so genuine. "Who Invented the Jumpshot" coasts into a story about a white man driving black players to a game. Then Wideman brings it to a halt so he can cover his bases: "It's fair to ask why, first thing, I'm inside the driver's head. . . . A carful of bloods and look whose brain I pick to pick." Wideman's prose always has had a worked quality to it, and it does here, too, but in the past 10 years, he has layered this jittery self-consciousness with restraint. He also knows it's good to occasionally let go and simply play, as he does in "The Silence of Thelonius Monk," which opens with a fistfight between two poets, turns into a love story, and then delivers a biography of sorts on the jazz great of its title. Wideman knows when to deliver a dirge, as he does in "Sightings," an eerie piece about glimpsing a now-dead colleague. There is a flinty whiff of mortality to these tales, their willingness to go straight at the heart of the matter but still call themselves fiction. Clearly, John Edgar Wideman has a reckoning to make, and aside from his obvious lyrical gifts, witnessing that on the page is one big reason why you should buy these stories, take them home, and hold on tight. John Freeman is a writer in New York. | ||
| Chris Hayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1057 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
I read it. My favorite was "The Silence of Thelonious Monk" that appeared in Callaloo a few years ago. | ||
| kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 451 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
Hi Chris, The one about the writer and the mother was my favorite. I liked the one about the white neighbor across the street from the black guy. I also really liked "Silence of Thelonious Monk", the one on the island in Carribean and "Sightings", which I believe ran in the PARIS REVIEW. | ||
| kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 452 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
The whole book is a masterpiece of great writing. | ||
| ABM "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 2230 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
I read Wideman's "Hoop Dreams". Though I found "Hoop" a bit too autobiographical and overwrought in certain places, it is a lovingly lyrical ode to the game basketball from the perspective of the 99.99% of us brothahs who'll never score a multi-million dollar NBA contract. So I'll probably read Wideman's "God's Gym". PS: Kola. You still suspect that Wideman and I are one in the same? HAHA! | ||
| ABM "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 2231 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Correction: Wideman's prior book is "Hoop Roots", NOT "Hoop Dreams". | ||
| kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 458 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
ABM, I no longer think that you are John Edgar Wideman, although it would VERY CRUEL, if you were to turn out to be him----after getting all in my privates, as you have----and not tell me, since you know I despise him, or rather, despise what men like him represent to lost ghetto girls like me. I'm sure, that because he was my teen crush when I idolized his every paragraph, there is a part of me that will always love the "fictional version" of him that I had created in my mind. Poor man. Hated for no reason by thousands of nameless, faceless dark girls who are invisible to people like him. I wrote a lot about him my upcoming autobiography---and YOU'RE in that particular chapter, too. It's a letter to my sons called "The Authentic Black Man". I quote you in that chapter as my cyber boyfriend ABM SAID. You bet not be John Edgar Wideman, BOY!!!! | ||
| Chris Hayden "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Chrishayden Post Number: 1058 Registered: 03-2004 Rating: N/A |
Kola: The one about the writer and the mother was "Weight", wasn't it? That one was in the same issue of Callaloo as "Silence". You have a problem with him and the white woman, don't you? I did a story that was sort of surrealist collage called "Compartmentalized Man". In it I meet John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed and Cornel West on a corner up the street from me. They proceed to give me writing advice. The ghost of my Republican grandmother chides me not to listen to them because they are all married to white women. (I inform her that only Ishmael and Wideman are, that West is married to an Ethiopian) No, it has not been published--hahaha | ||
| Mahogany Anais "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Mahoganyanais Post Number: 108 Registered: 01-2005 Rating: N/A |
Chris, I like that story concept! I've been writing J.E.W. a fan letter for years, thinking of turning it into a creative nonfiction essay. He grew up in Homewood which is near where I live now. His brother's incarceration is still a hot topic around here. He is the picture of rehabilitation, but cannot get paroled. He was in town recently for a literary festival, and I missed it! (Family illness down in Florida) I like so much of J.E.W.'s work, but I recently re-read Two Cities and fell in love all over again. | ||
| kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 462 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
Well no, Chris. It's a LOT more than his white wife. THAT I could live with and get over. It's just some things he wrote about "race" and his vision of himself as a black man and such. I write quite IN DEPTH about my disillusionment in my autobiography. But yeah, the fact that when I was 14 and 15, I was grooming myself to become his wife doesn't help. LOL | ||
| kola@aalbc.com Moderator Username: Kola Post Number: 465 Registered: 02-2005 Rating: N/A |
For those reading this thread.....I have NEVER met, talked to or been anywhere near John Edgar Wideman. So please DO NOT think that he actually did something to me personally. I just can't stand his ass for IMPERSONAL reasons that are deeply political and social. But PLEASE BUY "God's Gym", because it's an absolutely fabulous short story collection and he's a truly gifted, brilliant writer. | ||
| ABM "Cyniquian" Level Poster Username: Abm Post Number: 2245 Registered: 04-2004 Rating: N/A |
Chris, Clever...and maybe marketable. It is ironic how none of those 3 ULTRA-conscience Black are married to African American women. It's like some AA's only feel good about being Black AFTER they've received some validation by non-Black foks. Kola, I'm no JEW (though there's nothing wrong with that). Though, thanks for mentioning me within your works. It's like a part of me will live forever amid your prodigious talents (and I'm not only talking about your boobies  ). PS: Oh. Don't worry. You're "privates" are safe with me (at least until I get desperate). | ||
| Anonymous Rating: |
One story which stands out in my mind is "Are Dreams Faster Than the Speed of Light?" (question mark mine) about a man who finds out he has only one year to live, even as his father lies in the hospital terminally ill. Something like that actually happened in my family so I was particularly attuned to that and touched by it. I have no idea where he came up with the concept! Interesting that the collection also includes a story about the death of a mother. It's a tough thing to have to go through. For that matter, I have sympathy for Peter Jennings right now as well. Anyway, a friend told me that one of the reviewers (I didn't read any reviews myself) said that the best stories were the ones that were the most autobiographical. Interesting observation if true. I think this is an extraordinary collection of short stories, although I'd like to reread it, especially since the last story, Sightings, didn't really click with me, and some have called it the best story. My only criticism would be about the second story; I could have done without the rape, imagined or not. A major American writer, underappreciated, that's for sure, but also not the easiest or most accessible style for most readers, and I'm not referring only to the stream-of-consciousness style of these stories. This kind of writing, to me, is very comparable to jazz music, which is never going to appeal to a large audience. | ||
| Walter Matthews Nuggins, Jr. Newbie Poster Username: Evangelist Post Number: 5 Registered: 04-2005 Rating: N/A |
Your taste is excellent, Kola. This was a fine book. Wideman, I think, is probably our greatest living writer, but he never gets the acclaim and praise due him. | ||
| Walter Matthews Nuggins, Jr. Newbie Poster Username: Evangelist Post Number: 6 Registered: 04-2005 Rating: N/A |
HEY. How come my name showed up on this post? |
