Wideman's first novel in a decade conjures the author of The Wretched of the Earth and his urgent relevance today.

Wideman's fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoir to evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of The Wretched of the Earth. A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1927, Fanon fought to defend France during World War II and then later against France in Algeria's war for independence. The Wretched of the Earth, written in 1961, inspired leaders of liberation movements from Steve Biko in South Africa to Che Guevera to the Black Panthers in the United States.

Wideman's novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African-American novelist, Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, and part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood, and chases the meaning of Fanon's legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify.

"Psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon (1925 — 1961) fought to free Algeria from French rule, and wrote several key texts on colonialism, including The Wretched of the Earth. Wideman (Brothers and Keepers) offers a fragmented look at Fanon's life, presenting three narratives in fits and starts. The first documents episodes from Fanon's life, including his Martinique childhood and death in a Bethesda, Md., hospital. In the second, a 60-year-old novelist named Thomas writes a screenplay about Fanon that he hopes to sell to Jean-Luc Godard, and, in a jarring narrative turn, receives a package that contains his own head. In the third, a character named John Edgar Wideman writes about his 'twin' (Thomas), wrestles with his obsession with Fanon, visits his imprisoned brother Rob and thinks about his wheelchair-bound mother in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh (where Wideman grew up and has set many past stories). Some of the Fanon anecdotes are excellent, but the book as a whole is a series of glittering dead ends, interspersed with thoughts on writing and current affairs, and the irritating story of Thomas's head. Beautifully written but inconclusive, Wideman's 18th book is best approached as a meditation on fiction and character." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The cover of John Edgar Wideman's latest novel — Fanon's name boldly inscribed in gray against a black background — immediately attracts attention. Riding on the Metro, my copy in hand, I notice another passenger — an African-American man in his mid-40s — carrying a copy, too. Our eyes meet and we nod to each other, almost conspiratorially, as if we are members of a secret fraternity. But as I..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) return to my reading, I find myself wondering what my comrade is thinking about as he turns the pages.

Martinique-born, French-educated psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary Frantz Fanon continues to haunt and inspire the imagination of many, long after his death in 1961 from leukemia at the National Institutes of Health, under the watchful eye of the CIA, which had arranged his transportation to the United States for medical care. An astute analyst of the psychic disorders inflicted by colonialism, an apostle of violence as one of the key solutions to the problem, a patron saint of the Black Panther Party and many Third World revolutionaries, Fanon has now been canonized by academic theorists of post-colonial studies.

Wideman, an African American writer born in Washington in 1941, has long been drawn to him, since the first time he read Fanon's acknowledged classic, 'The Wretched of the Earth,' written in white heat during the last year of his life. As he acknowledges in the open letter to Fanon that begins this curious novel: 'I wanted to be somebody, an unflinchingly honest, scary somebody like Frantz Fanon whose words and deeds just might ignite a revolution, just might help cleanse the world of the plague of racism.'

Having failed to meet the standards set by Fanon's example, Wideman reconciles himself to his Fanon project as a 'source of anxiety and unfulfilled ambition.' And, indeed, these anxieties and unfulfilled ambitions pervade 'Fanon,' a work that is as much concerned with failed hopes and dreams, the inadequacy of language, and the act of writing as it is with its purported subject.

Readers approaching 'Fanon' looking for a more or less straightforward biography will be disappointed: 'I'm reluctant to say,' Wideman maintains, 'whether my evolving project is fiction or nonfiction, novel or memoir, science fiction or romance.' Not only does he refuse to draw sharp distinctions between fact and fiction, he also seems to regard biography with particular disdain: 'Doesn't biography or, worse, autobiography serve readers primarily as a source for gossip, rumor-mongering, titillation. Thinly disguised voyeurism. An absent life substituting for a reader's absent life.'

Instead, Wideman freely invents himself: a fictional writer named Thomas, who also is anxiously wrestling with a book project about Frantz Fanon and who has convinced himself that a large box he has received at his Lower East Side apartment contains a severed human head. He fills the story out with several other characters taken from 'real' life: Wideman's brother, Robby, now approaching his third decade of incarceration at the State Correctional Institution at Pittsburgh — and a permanent feature of Wideman's work since the publication of his award-winning memoir 'Brothers and Keepers' (1984); his aging mother, ailing and confined to a wheelchair; and, of course, Fanon, whom we sight at different times and places in his life — Martinique, Lyon and Paris, Algeria, Mali, the United States.

'Fanon' shuttles briskly and unexpectedly from one place to the next: from the streets of lower Manhattan, where Thomas roams; to Robby's prison, where Wideman and his mother visit; to southern France, where Thomas travels, seeking to pitch Fanon's life as a film to Jean-Luc Godard, who, he suspects, may be as despairing of the power of film as Thomas is suspicious of the power of words; to Wideman's Pittsburgh neighborhood, where he (or Thomas) treats a visiting Godard to a soul food meal. Wideman roams freely across time and space, apparently unconcerned about historical anachronisms. At some point he has confided in Robby and his mother about the project, and these two figures emerge as both auditors and collaborators. They also have some of the best monologues and stories in the book.

During one of Wideman's prison visits, Robby tells him: 'Guess what. Your mother over there claims she met Fanon during one of her stays in the hospital.' This introduces yet another twist into the work: Wideman's mother will end up looking after a dying Fanon.

With more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, two PEN/Faulkner awards and a literary society dedicated to his work, Wideman is at the top of his form. In the heightened consciousness he brings to issues of narrative point of view, representation and language, he pushes literary conventions almost beyond their limits, and perhaps beyond some of his readers, too. But the brilliance of his language, the power of his storytelling and the sheer bravado and unexpectedness of his riffs exert considerable charms. In this respect, his brother Robby has some of the best lines: 'Plenty times I don't agree with them knucklehead ideas I been hearing from you my whole life, but I like to hear your (expletive) anyway. ... When you get off on words and get to rapping and signifying.'"

Reviewed by James A. Miller, who is a professor of English and American Studies at George Washington University, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"[N]ot so much about Fanon the man as it is about writing about Fanon, about writing in a world in which revolutionary hopes have soured, about writing, period." Los Angeles Times

"This is an engrossing search for meaning in life and in the enduring legacy of Fanon at a time when racial animus, sadly, continues unabated." Booklist

"Wideman grounds the novel in powerful chapters set in his native Pittsburgh, specifically the impoverished, gang-ridden streets of Homewood." San Francisco Chronicle

Widemans fascinating new novel weaves together fiction, biography, and memoirto evoke the life and message of Frantz Fanon, the influential author of "TheWretched of the Earth" and acute critic of racism and oppression.

John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent books are Hoop Roots and The Island: Martinique. He teaches at Brown University.