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PHILADELPHIA FIRE by John Edgar Wideman...
Limelight suited John Edgar Wideman, a former University of Pennsylvania basketball star and Rhodes scholar who became a novelist once heralded as the "black Faulkner." But in 1976 the light began to darken. Wideman's younger brother Robert was convicted as an accomplice to a murder and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. Ten years later, the writer's 16- year-old son Jacob stabbed a camping companion to death and, like his uncle, was given a life term...
...golden writer and the convict brother could come from the same Pittsburgh family was the burden of Wideman's nonfictional Brothers and Keepers (1984). The theme of the lost son pervades Philadelphia Fire, a novel that, like the earlier book, pits the author's refined literary sensibility against the crudity and violence of racism around...
...Wideman's narrator, known as Cudjoe, is a mask for the 49-year-old author. Fiction and fact are freely blended; the style is a mix of directness and allusion reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Cudjoe, in fact, is invisible to himself. He has been an expatriate, living on a Greek island where he tended bar by day and tried to write at night...
...Vietnam vet in 2001. Buffalo Girls by Larry McMurtry -- Calamity Jane, Bill Cody and Sitting Bull whoop it up. Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver -- Environmental catastrophe meets Native American mythology. The Final Club by Geoffrey Wolff -- Class warfare at Princeton during the 1950s. Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman -- Fictional characters caught up in the factual bombing of Move headquarters by Philadelphia police in 1985. Age of Iron by J.M. Coetzee -- South Africa, with cancer as a metaphor for apartheid. Rabbit at Rest by John Updike -- Harry Angstrom hops offstage, perhaps to meet his maker. The Further Inquiry...