Word: kassima
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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John Edgar Wideman subtitles his eighth novel, Two Cities (Houghton Mifflin; 242 pages; $24), "A Love Story," but his version of that familiar genre seems at times the antithesis of standard romance. Robert Jones, 50, meets Kassima, 35, at a dance club, and she eventually invites him back to her house. Good sex leads to good conversation and then to love, an emotion that fills Kassima with terror and dread. Within a recent span of 10 months, both of her teenage sons were killed by gang violence in her Pittsburgh neighborhood and their father died of aids he contracted...
This is not, of course, the end of the story. Kassima has a strange sort of angel in her house, her tenant Mr. Mallory, an elderly eccentric who moved from Philadelphia late in his life to wander the streets taking photographs. Against her will, Kassima begins to care about her increasingly enfeebled housemate, another death in her life waiting to happen. If she can let Mr. Mallory matter to her, why not Robert Jones...
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