Books

Since John Edgar Wideman's 18th book, Fanon, is inspired by the life and writings of Martiniquean psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon, readers might expect a closely analyzed fictionalization of his experiences.

But Mr. Wideman provides only intermittent bursts of narrative about Fanon. Around, through and below those sections are narrative streams about Mr. Wideman's failed attempt to complete his Fanon project; about Mr. Wideman's imagined conversation with the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard; about life in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh; about Mr. Wideman's mother, Elizabeth, and his imprisoned brother, Rob; about Thomas, a writer working on his own flagging Fanon project.

The novel opens with Thomas at home, daydreaming about the delivery of a severed head as he struggles to complete his manuscript. The doorbell rings: Thomas receives an unsolicited package from UPS containing a severed head with an attached quotation from Fanon: "We must immediately take the war to the enemy, leave him no rest, harass him. Cut off his breath."

The mysterious, grotesque gift allows connection between Mr. Wideman's literary-tangle and our anxieties about terrorists and terrorism. But instead of instilling fear, Mr. Wideman uses Fanon to question definitions of "terror," the suppression of dissent and the techniques of storytelling.

The real-life Fanon, often labeled "an apostle of violence, hater of whites, spawner of terrorists," is frequently misread and misunderstood by both his acolytes and detractors as being anti-Western and engaging in race-baiting. But works such as Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) show he was a learned Western intellectual dedicated to eradicating narrow ideological thinking, racist social arrangements and imperialism.

Mr. Wideman populates his own work with multiple voices to articulate variations on Fanon's ideas. Slyly, Mr. Wideman marks his own literary attitude when he describes his mother's style of oral storytelling – "flattening and fattening" point of view, cramming "everything, everyone, everywhere into the present, into words that flow, intimate and immediate as the images of a [Romare] Bearden painting."

Bearden's jazz-infused art is an apt analog: Mr. Wideman sutures his patches of story together collage-like, threading Fanon's theories on racism and political oppression into lyrical structures that swing like Ornette Coleman solos. Mr. Wideman practices radical, experimental modernism; his artistic forebears include Alberto Giacometti, Thelonious Monk and Samuel Beckett.

Mr. Wideman's lineage makes Fanon a demanding, high-art novel. It will frankly, unfortunately, leave some readers confused, others unmoved, cold.

But the payoff for those who invest in Fanon, engaging (and analyzing) the promises (and pitfalls) of Mr. Wideman's literary gamesmanship, is intense and liberating.

Walton Muyumba is a writer and professor living in Dallas.

John Edgar Wideman

(Houghton Mifflin, $24)

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