The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Two Cities by John Edgar WidemanRobert Zamsky
John Edgar Wideman. Two Cities. Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 256 pp. $24.00.
In many ways, Two Cities feels like a culmination of Wideman’s earlier work, and is especially reminiscent of Philadelphia Fire. In fact, one of the narrative strains in the book revisits the story of the Afrocentric group MOVE which Wideman so powerfully told in his earlier novel. However, Two Cities is more narrativistic and contemplative than the more textually complex and perhaps angrier Philadelphia Fire. The result is a novel that maintains the thematic intensity of Wideman’s earlier fiction and essays, yet adopts a softer, more haunting tone. This shift in tone feels perfectly suited to what is at stake in Two Cities. The novel ponders the disparities between perception and memory. Everywhere there is slippage; nothing is as it was. As the character Robert Jones says in one of his never-to-be-sent letters to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, “When you turn from the model to shape a portrait or clay figure, it’s memory and habit, not sight, that guide your hand.” As with this sculptor, the characters of the story are constantly confronting their pasts, coming to grips with their memories and habits in hopes to overcome their limitations. As the relationships in this novel demonstrate, such struggles themselves may indeed be works of art. This concern with the motion of memory is also embodied in the novel’s structure. It opens with Jones reading, tasting the definitions of words in the dictionary. The last he reads is “Zugunruhe . . . A noun—the migratory drive.” The word is picked up again by Wideman as the title for a page-long postscript, thus framing the novel with the sense of instinctual movement across space and time. The novel comes to reside, then, within the crux of how to reconcile this impulse toward newness with the persistence of memory and habit. [Robert Zamsky]