SLAVEROAD

A distinguished author riffs on his life and the Black experience.

A prolific, much-honored writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Wideman has a substantial following who will applaud this latest work. The opening pages, which describe his elder son’s struggle to attend his dying mother, Wideman’s ex-wife, and his younger son’s long imprisonment, may suggest a straightforward autobiography to come, but the author’s musings on what this book might be called (“poetry, novel, history, fiction, biography, holy writ, etc.”) hint that what follows is not journalism but high literature. Almost immediately, Wideman rewinds the clock to introduce characters who may be but probably aren’t his ancestors: Rebekah, servant or slave of a wealthy religious southern couple who is sexually used by the husband and brutally beaten and crippled by the wife. A major figure is William Henry Sheppard, a Black Virginia-born American missionary sent to an outpost on the Congo River in 1890 “about the same time Joseph Conrad had passed through.” Wideman’s Sheppard does not ignore the white colonial abuse that Conrad recorded, but mostly he treasures the acceptance he enjoys in an all-Black society, so much so that he betrays his wife. Although Sheppard died in 1934, Wideman cannot stop thinking of parallels in their lives. Wideman’s writing in this and earlier works has been described as experimental, mixing sentence fragments with page-long sentences, eschewing punctuation and employing stream-of-consciousness techniques that owe more to James Joyce than to Toni Morrison. Readers with a few college literature courses under their belts will have an easier time.

Less a memoir than a passionate prose poem.