SOURCE: Pinckney, Darryl. “'Cos I'm a So-o-oul Man.” Times Literary Supplement (23 August 1991): 19-20.

In the following mixed assessment, Pinckney maintains that “the range of characters in his recent collection of stories, Fever: Twelve Stories, is agreeably broad, the situations are carefully realized; the short story is perhaps Wideman's true form.”

Black writing in the United States is in full reaction against the psychological realism and apocalyptic fantasies of the 1960s that were a form of bringing news from the other, hidden, hip side of town. It is most commonly expressed as a matter of audience, alternative discourse, reclaiming black history, control of the word, or a return to black communal values now that humanism's mask of universality has been seen through. Hence the slyly innocent fabulations of Toni Morrison, or the outrageous historical revisionism of Ishmael Reed. The wish to be rid of the burden of being both...