Given Wideman's concern with heritage, it is fitting to trace his own literary heritage. His literary ancestors are both black and white, including renowned African-American writers like Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, and Caucasians like Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, and William Faulkner.

In the generational span of his novels and in the illumination of family ties, Wideman might be compared to Toni Morrison. Like her, he renders a variety of characters over an extended period. Also like Morrison, he admits ghosts as characters whose presence is strange but not extraordinary. The dialect is similar to that used in Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982), but the book also echoes the colloquial language used in the works of Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.

Wideman's other literary connections may be found in Southern writers like Welty and Faulkner. In the lyrical, unhurried rendering of family relationships, Wideman...