God's Gym: Stories
By John Edgar Wideman
(Houghton Mifflin, 175 pp., $23)
No American writer dribbles a sentence quite like John Edgar Wideman. Watching him thread language between the 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 entirely shake with this dance, though, and that is life itself. Over the past two decades he's given us three separate memoirs about events that have indelibly marked him—the life imprisonment of his younger brother Robby (in Brothers and Keepers, Holt, 1984) and the life imprisonment of his son, Jacob (in Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society, Pantheon, 1994). A nephew was also killed in a drive-by shooting, which Wideman addresses in his novel The Cattle Killing (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). 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 win the PEN/Faulkner Prize for fiction two different times, John Edgar Wideman has remained painfully intimate with the cancers of violence, drug use and institutionalized poverty. Success has not given him a reprieve.
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?, the author subtly asks himself again and again. What purpose do they serve, and what solace can they provide if they cannot alleviate his loved ones' pain?
Readers accustomed to fiction coming from a safe remove ought to be forewarned: God's Gym is close to the bone. In "Weight," for instance, a narrator tries to write his way into his mother's mind through her body—her strength, specifically—and discovers she is suddenly talking back, irritated by being used in fiction. "That's what upset you, wasn't it," the narrator quips back. "Saying goodbye to you. Practicing for your death in a story." Until this authorial intrusion from his own character, Wideman the narrator is mostly invisible, the psychological motivations behind the storytelling safely in the background. One fracture, however, and suddenly the story isn't just about the narrator's mother, but also about the metaphysical vampirism of writing her into fiction.
"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, but it's never distracting, in part because it's so genuine. "Who Invented the Jumpshot" coasts into a story about a white man driving some 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." The "I" in this story is slippery. It could be Wideman himself, or it could be a disembodied narrator. Either way, it's brave of Wideman to court rupture so eagerly when he could clearly write a straightforward story—and if you want to read one, check out Stories of John Edgar Wideman (Pantheon, 1992)—but instead he goes right at his demons.
Wideman's prose has always had a worked quality to it, and does here too, but in the last 10 years he's layered in this self-consciousness, allowing his sentences to grow to Faulknerian lengths. He's become the kind of writer who doesn't go straight to the hoop. There are obstacles that only he sees—like the issue of his authority on the page, the reasons for what he does—and so what we get are sentences that juke and drive, pivot and double fake, seemingly at random. Read the words closely, however, and you can watch Wideman stutter-step his way to redemption.
All this might make Wideman sound like he's put the weight of the world on these stories. He has, and for the most part that's good. But he also knows that occasionally it's better to 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, too, as he does in "Sightings," an eerie piece about glimpsing a now-dead colleague in his university quad. What follows is a blizzard of words, as Wideman sifts through the memory of his years and recalls friends lost and gone, hunting trips he took in the New England snow. As this story hints, 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 happen here on the page is one big reason why you should buy these stories, take them home and hold on tight.
