SOURCE: "The Moose on the Family Dinner Table," in Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 2, Spring, 1995, pp. 369-72.

In the following review, Pinsker responds negatively to Fatheralong.

Race in America has been compared to a moose on the dining room table: nobody wants to call attention to the carcass despite the fact that antlers are sticking in the potatoes, hooves drip onto people's laps, and the smell keeps getting worse. Rather than acknowledge the obvious, people crane their necks around the rotting slab of flesh and ask those across the table to pass the salt.

John Edgar Wideman is a writer we've learned to trust when it comes to calling a moose a moose—that is, until Fatheralong. Ballyhooed as a meditation on "fathers and sons, race and society," Wideman watchers had good reasons to expect the same personal candor and sensitive trenchant social analysis he brought to Brothers...