Published by Scribner on March 20, 2018

American Histories is John Edgar Wideman’s new story collection. The four stories I’ll first mention here are masterful. The others are quite good, and the volume as a whole is another tribute to an important American writer who crafted a style that is uniquely his own. In a couple of the stories, Wideman describes his writing as unimportant, as compared to the things that smarter people do. I hope Wideman understands that his work is not just important: it’s vital.

“Williamsburg Bridge” is narrated by a man standing on the bridge where Sonny Rollins used to play his sax. The improvisational nature of jazz, its controlled chaos, fuels this story. The man has shed nearly all of his clothes and is preparing to jump, or not. He equates death with freedom, although he wonders if the bridge cops might shoot him before he has a chance to kill himself, taking away his freedom to choose, as freedom has so often been taken from people of color. He catalogs the many reasons he might want to commit suicide, but none are his motivation. It isn’t clear whether he even understands why he might choose to die, or to live. He hears “that question — why? —drum-drum drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I was able to produce.” He asks the reader whether you’re grateful that it’s his turn, not yours, at the edge. The story plays with images of color, from skin color to whitespace to colors in the East River ranging “from impenetrable oily sludge to purest glimmer.” (Edges and color are among several recurring themes in these stories.)

“Maps and Ledgers” is about families and hard times, the family histories that people don’t talk about — the father who killed a man, the son sentenced to life in prison, the grandmother with serial husbands. Bad things happen and the only thing you can count on is that life will get worse. Black and white families live apart, interacting but not really. The narrator speaks white English to whites and black English at home in his segregated neighborhood, in a society divided by laws and power that serves itself. “Don’t let the ugly take you down” the narrator’s mother says, and that’s the story’s lesson, but the lesson is easier to say than to live.

“JB & FD” are John Brown and Frederick Douglas, two men who tried to free America from the oppression of slavery. Told as an imagined conversation or correspondence over time, the story is about their fundamental agreements and disagreements, their differing strategic approaches to abolishing slavery. Douglas wishes to offer his life, not his death, to his people. Brown is convinced that an armed raid on Harper’s Ferry will spark a slave rebellion that makes the risk of death worth taking. Both men believe that change must come. The story ends with the rambling narrative of another John Brown, the son of Jim Daniels, who was rescued from slavery by John Brown and named his son after the man who gave him freedom. Wideman’s story reminds us that freedom is too precious to waste.

“Nat Turner’s Confession” takes on the controversial “confession” that Thomas Gray claimed to have received from Nat Turner. Most of Wideman’s story, like William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, is told in the first person from Turner’s perspective (“I am called Nat Turner, a name made up for the convenience of sellers and purchasers of me”), providing an alternative to the “confession” that Gray likely fabricated, at least in part. But other voices intrude in Wideman’s story, including Turner’s mother (representing the tribulations of all enslaved women) and a confession by Nate Parker (who made a movie about Nat Turner several years after being acquitted of rape). Wideman imagines Turner having a love/hate relationship with white people, a fear that he will miss them if he kills them all, a belief that “until they are gone, we will not truly cleanse ourselves of the belief that we are nothing without them.” Like many of Wideman’s stories, this one overflows with the joy of language and its rhythms.

Most of Wideman’s stories are deeply personal. “New Start” uses an aging couple watching Downtown Abbey to ask whether all our lives are performance, whether we need an audience of at least one to make them real. Our lives are stories, true stories “until we tumble out of them and then they are different and true again,” the ending unwritten and feared. In “Examination,” a visit to the doctor’s office triggers a riff on edges and democracy and social constructs and death, real and imagined. “The Writing Teacher” is about a professor, very much like Wideman, who tries to help students understand that their stories won’t appeal to every reader and that their fiction probably won’t change an intransigent and unfair world, admirable though it is to want to topple empires or to expose naked emperors. (Empires are another recurring theme.)

“Dark Matter” is about the things people discuss over dinner, but more importantly, it’s about the fact that friends go out to dinner and discuss things. “Shape the World Is In” is a monologue by a guy who is thinking about life as he sits on the toilet. “Yellow Sea” is about the evil in the world that keeps the narrator awake at night.

“My Dead” is more a contemplation of Wideman’s dead relatives than a story, but it is also a contemplation of mortality, of the impudence of life and the arbitrariness of death, of the recognition that only after people die do we really begin to give their lives the full consideration they deserve. “Bonds” is a sweet story about a woman who struggles not to give birth on an unlucky day to a child who will have enough bad luck being born into poverty and prejudice.

A few of the stories are sketches or vignettes. They discuss lines and names and death, the way things change and don’t, the divisions of people within an empire, the whiteness of snow. All of them are interesting, although I would classify some as essays rather than stories. A longer essay in the form of fiction imagines conversations between Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In the end, it doesn’t matter how these pieces are categorized, because good writing has value for its own sake, and American Histories is a collection of very good writing.

RECOMMENDED

A beautiful collection of stories that traverse our country and depict the real experience and soul of being part of it.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Some of the stories are fascinating and well done while others I found hard to get into. But any history lover will enjoy reading it.

In American Histories, Wideman brilliantly exploits a “threefold ordering of times”, offering the reader a story in the time of its narrator, the time in which the narrative takes place, and in historical time.

In the first story of American Histories, John Brown and Frederick Douglass debate the morality and tactics of a slave uprising. Both men are willing to give their lives, and deaths to end slavery. Wideman narrates the debate in the voices of Brown, Douglass, a modern storyteller, and strikingly, a “colored John Brown”, all living the legacy of JB and FD.

In other stories, Wideman remembers his dead family, tells a hall of mirrors story of watchers watching watchers watching, and a greek tragedy of murdered and murderers.

I received a free Kindle copy of American Histories by John Edgar Wideman courtesy of Net Galley  and Simon and Schuster, the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus pages.

I requested this book due to the description given on Net Galley. It sounded interesting and compelling. It is the first book by John Edgar Wideman that I have read.

I had very high hopes for this book after reading the description and reviews of other books by the author. Unfortunately, I found this book a struggle to read due to the author's style of writing. The book itself is a series of short stories dealing with the struggles and challenges of African Americans. These are stories that need to be told, but a more consisent and readable approach is needed.

As other reviewers have rated this book highly, I will not not recommend this book, but suggest that you get if from your local library before making a purchase decision.

This book is difficult to read. I don't mean “difficult to read” in the sense that it is a portraying a reality too horrible and too injustice to contemplate, although the reality that it is attempting to portray is indeed horrible and unjust. It is difficult to read in the sense that it is often difficult to tell what exactly is happening in the stories and who is doing what to whom.

It is of course not necessary for every book to be entertaining in the way that, for example, books by J. K. Rowling or P. G. Wodehouse are entertaining. Serious and even unpleasant books about serious and unpleasant topics are not just important. They are essential. Wideman reportedly has written such books. I have not read Wideman's other books, but I have read the opinions of well-informed people of good will who have said that Wideman's writings are important and deserve attention. The writings have won many awards. I hope in the future that I will have a chance to read something else by him. But I cannot recommend this book to anyone.

It is sometimes difficult to tell which selections are memoirs and which selections are fiction. Perhaps they are all fiction, but it is difficult to tell in some cases. In other cases, it's not so hard. Since, for example, I have not read in the newspapers or on Wideman's Wikipedia entry that he once climbed on the Williamsburg Bridge, stripped to his underwear, and threated to jump, I guess this story is fiction, even though the story's protagonist is a man whose life details are seemingly similar to Wideman's. Surely, if Wideman had actually threatened spectacular public suicide, it would have made the news, right? On the other hand, the story when he lists names of family members (they all share the surname Wideman) and their dates of birth and death, and writes about his feelings about his family, is non-fiction. Am I right? Or is this some sort of post-modern writerly trick where the writer mixes true and made-up material and proves that all information is unreliable and as a result …. what? Trust no one? Stop reading the newspaper? Give up hope?

Some stories are better because they feature characters that are historical (Frederick Douglas, John Brown, Nat Turner) and therefore clearly not the author. The reader is given some solid ground to stand on.

There is a certain sameness in the authorial voice throughout all the stories, even when it is difficult to tell who is narrating and why. For example, in many stories, the protagonist is a older man who admires at some point in the story, sometimes generally, sometimes specifically, female rear ends. These moments of posterior admiration pass quickly and I don't think they would offend most readers, but still – how about drawing the reader a character who is clearly different, at least in some respects?

One story, which has appeared in the New Yorker, is about the difficulties of being a university-level writing teacher, as I believe Wideman is now or perhaps has been. Although this story is more interesting than the usual entry in this genre, I find stories about by university writing professors about university writing professors to be a genre with, to be charitable, little potential.

I received a free electronic advance review copy of this book via Netgalley and Simon & Schuster.

This is an amazingly strong collection of stories examining the African American experience from multiple points of view. Employing a wide range of voices, these stories vary in length, but most share a quality of extraordinary depth not usually as consistent in other collections. There is not a lightweight in the bunch, which in some cases caused me to set the book down for a while since as a whole, it is a lot to digest at one go. As with most fine collections, a meaty selection such as this requires more work than a novel of the same length, and this one, with its lessons, observations and quality, is harder work than most, and more rewarding.

Some really powerful stories told with an unconventional style. You can almost taste the strength of feeling from John Edgar Wideman.