FANON
By John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin,
229 pages, $24

Is it high tribute or snarky takedown to say that a novelist’s prose reads like verse? The “poetry of imagination,” scolded Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, precedes the “prose of thought.” Does that notion console the reader of John Edgar Wideman’s Fanon as he struggles through five-page thickets of rather disconnected words, praying for the arrival of a period, an inner copy editor demanding the liberal placement of ¶’s in the margins.

“As he turns back,” begins one of Mr. Wideman’s verse-worthy performances, “he widens his eyes and nods, his gaze brushing hers, letting her share if she chooses the information his eyes carry about how rapidly the crowd’s growing for this matinee performance in dismal weather and somewhere in there between glances and glances away he says hi or hello, an English greeting in France, and she responds with the same English word and he repeats it, the echoing maybe a bit too cute, more playful than cute he hopes, aren’t adults allowed to be playful, though there’s a chance someone standing in this line or in the crowd streaming by on the boulevard would, if given the opportunity, torture you, chop off your head. …”  read more »