SOURCE: "Living in the Enemy's Dream," in London Review of Books, Vol. 19, No. 23, November 27, 1997, pp. 25-6.

In the following review, Wood delineates Wideman's handling of the various themes, characters, and subjects in The Cattle Killing and Brothers and Keepers.

'Maybe this is a detective story,' a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman's novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It's a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any of Wideman's books that I've read. But they are not detective stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as If from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon. 'Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life?' Wideman asks in his memoir...