SOURCE: "Rage," in American Book Review, Vol. 10, No. 1, March-April, 1988, pp. 8-14.

Jaffe is a noted critic, editor of Fiction International, and author of several books, including Othello Blues (1996). In the following review, he responds enthusiastically to Reuben, noting Wideman's ability to communicate the tremendous depths of rage present within the novel's characters and their surroundings.

The stunning anger pulsing like an outside heart in Reuben underscores one of the signal questions of our time for the artist: how to forge an oppositional art. Not merely an art that is, or means to be, uncomplicitous with the dominant ideology, but a calculated art specifically designed to infiltrate, rupture, destabilize.

Fredric Jameson, in an essay on the visual artist Hans Haacke, puts it plainly: "It is no longer possible to oppose or contest the logic of the image-world of late capitalism by reinventing an older logic of the referent (or...