TWO CITIES
A Love Story

John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin

What do we call a work of art that re-creates a single moment in a nighttime summer sky? A billion points of pulse-white light cast in one great swath across a black velvet canvas as if dice thrown by a giant hand in some long-gone age and then frozen in the forever that is now. Great art, we call such a re-creation, because it is not often done.

What, then, do we call it when the artist carries it a step further, setting all these galaxies spinning...stars ducking and diving and twirling on their axes...all in seeming chaos and yet all with a pre-routed plan that we can only dimly perceive...and we are cast through wormholes and propelled by galactic explosions...and time moves back and forth upon itself so that there is no beginning and no end, but only a rollercoast road that leads us somewhere to the point where the universe curves back upon itself and we meet our own image coming toward us from the other direction. Here is art that demands not just attention but participation, because we find that the journey has not simply been to the very edge of the heavens, it has also been into the hidden passageways of our own hearts.

This is the art of two-time PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist John Edgar Wideman, author of seven novels, one memoir, and four short story collections. His latest offering is "Two Cities," a novel of violence, death, art and redemption in the African-American communities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

Wideman has no respect for time, or, more accurately, he treats time as would a mythic god, bending it to his own wishes. Storylines move backward and forward, and jump from one to another without warning. Thoughts end up as conversations...conversations drift back into silent musings. There is a Joyce-like quality to Wideman’s work, though "Two Cities" is far more accessible than "Ulysses." The author is a master storyteller, and he draws a narrative line with him like the tail of a comet trailing behind. But this is not subway reading. You’ve got to get to the end of the chapter, at least. And you have to pay attention.

"Two Cities" is the intertwining of the lives of four characters: Mr. Mallory, an aging, disabled World War II veteran who spends his last years working on a photographic project; Robert, a 50 year-old man seeking to recapture the dreams of his life in the arms of a younger woman; and Kassima, a young woman scarred by the deaths of a husband to AIDS and two teenage sons to gang violence in the space of a year.

As in many of his novels, Wideman blends fiction with fact here. The fourth character is John Africa, the martyred leader of Philadelphia’s black revolutionary MOVE organization, who died along with at least 10 other MOVE members in 1985 when police dropped an incendiary bomb on their house and leveled the neighborhood. We are never quite certain if John Africa actually appears, or if he is merely a dreamed vehicle for Mr. Mallory to work out his understanding of the injustices of his world, a conversation with his own mind. "He watches John Africa fade into the grayness, the grayness give up John Africa again." But all else in this book is brutally real. The MOVE conflagration, street gang warfare between groups identified only as "the Blues" and "the Reds," and Kassima’s struggle with loving again after having lost so much...all are bursting nova that light up the skies of these "Two Cities," crossing and re-crossing each other’s path, brighter and more revealing with each encounter.

Wideman’s characters’ life observations, often tossed out matter-of-factly in the midst of a conversation, are both rhythmically rich and almost biblically wise. Here a woman’s view of romantic love: "Grab what you can and get out of Dodge is what the guys learn early, early, and you learn game too, the gabbing and growling and goo-goo back and forth that starts out not meaning a thing, just play, just going up and down on a seesaw, then one day your big soft butt nailed flat to the ground and babies in both arms and the seesaw ain’t heehaw no more, no sweet man on the other end..." A thought on white people coming across a black man walking through their neighborhood: "[they] turn away quickly like they’re seeing the nasty evidence of something wrong they did the night before and don’t hardly need to be reminded of it first thing on a new morning;" The value of the materials collected in life: "How many things did anyone need to begin a life, to live one, to finish one. One moment you’re here breathing, believing you need shoes, boxes, a black dress, then you’re gone and what you’ve saved to keep you company nothing, smoke drifting away like you drift away, just a nuisance, smoke getting in somebody else’s nose and eyes who has to clean up behind you."

"Two Cities" is not the effort that Wideman’s last book was. But "The Cattle Killing" was a masterpiece, and an author ought not to be punished if he cannot duplicate his last, best work. Judged by most standards, "Two Cities" is good enough.