Basketball, Race, and Love

When reporters write about John Edgar Wideman, they usually start with the most sensational aspects of his life. That's why you find the same factoids in most profiles of the man and his books: He grew up in a ghetto in Pittsburgh. He became a scholarship student and eventually escaped to the Ivy League, unlike his brother Robert, who ended up in prison.

It's equally hard for writers to resist reciting Wideman's credentials: He became an All-American forward on the basketball team at Penn. There he was named the second black Rhodes scholar ever in 1963, and the first since 1907. Wideman is the only novelist to win the prestigious PEN/Faulkner award twice; he has also won the MacArthur "genius" award. It's an all-too-familiar story, a heartening stereotype: A kid from the ghetto makes good.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the first article ever written about Wideman, a profile in Life, was simply titled "The Astonishing John Edgar Wideman." Or that Salon called the young Wideman, with unintended irony, "an African-American golden boy." Or that Esquire ran a profile of Wideman that read like a checkout-line tabloid, detailing the emotional turbulence of Wideman's family.

As sensational as all this attention may be, the combination of adversity and critical acclaim places him squarely in the cult of personality in American literature, right next to such luminaries as Langston Hughes (accused by Joseph McCarthy of being a Communist) and Zora Neal Hurston (famous for her life on the road).

But such attention also suggests the danger of misreading John Edgar Wideman. It's easy to sketch the trials and achievements of a remarkable life like his. It's much more difficult to evaluate Wideman's writing.

A Life in Literature

Now is as apt a time as any to weigh Wideman's activism and oeuvre, which keeps expanding-Wideman's latest offering, "Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love," will appear in paperback this spring.

In his 15 books, Wideman has tracked racial conflict in the U.S. with the precision of a topographic map. His novel, The Cattle Killing, is set during the 1793 outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, where blacks were scapegoated for the epidemic. Philadelphia Fire, another novel, is based on the firebombing of MOVE, a black separatist group. Brothers and Keepers chronicles Wideman's relationship with his brother Robert, from Pittsburgh to Western Penitentiary, where Robert Wideman lives today.

In these books and elsewhere, Wideman has proven a rare stylist: He has brilliantly extended the long-running emphasis among African American writers on rendering black speech and rhythms. His prose can be scanned like poetry or, better, performed as a song or slam before a microphone.

What's more, Wideman has written about the urban experience in the United States as well as anyone ever has, from colonial Philadelphia through today's inner city. And in the face of grim realities -- of racism malicious and intractable -- he does not allow justifiable rage to degenerate into passive detachment from America's burning questions and problems. As Walter Mosley noted in a review, "Through Wideman's masterly narrative the reader learns how to accept hopelessness without giving up hope."

"Hoop Roots" is no departure from this pattern. The book contains everything that makes Wideman one of the most accomplished American writers today -- and also one of the most challenging and problematic for readers. Critics and scholars of many races have hailed Wideman's work, but this acclaim has not translated into a broad popular following. You seldom hear Wideman mentioned in the same breath as Toni Morrison or Cornell West. None of his books has made it into the high school literary canon.

Why is this? Perhaps it's because John Edgar Wideman consistently challenges his readers to do more work than any contemporary author. He defies our expectations about what a book is, and in particular what a book on race is. His greatest contribution, then, may be raising a question: What do readers commonly expect from a leading black writer, and are these expectations ever fair?