SOURCE: Kenan, Randall. “A Most Righteous Prayer.” The Nation 250, no. 1 (1 January 1990): 25-7.

In the following review, Kenan discusses the defining characteristics of the stories comprising Fever: Twelve Stories.

“Do not look for straightforward, linear steps from book to book,” wrote John Edgar Wideman in the 1985 preface to his Homewood Trilogy. “Think rather of circles within circles within circles, a stone dropped into a still pool, ripples and wavemotions.” In Fever [Fever: Twelve Stories], Wideman has troubled the water again, refining his already elliptical and dense prose; in the process he has reinvented black English and (re)made it, elegant, suave, as elastic as ever: “Ball be swishing with that good backspin, that good arch bringing it back, blip, blip, blip, three bounces and it's coming right back to Doc's hands like he got a string on the pill,” he writes in “Doc's Story,” a story about stories, a...