©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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Review by Robert Fleming
Like a magnificent actor at the top of his form, novelist John Edgar Wideman can transform the personality of his writing style to suit his subject and message at will, which he does again in his latest novel, The Cattle Killing. A former Rhodes scholar, Wideman researches his novels meticulously, absorbing every detail, whether emotional or historical, before changing that exacting sense of care to the written page.
All these qualities are evident in Wideman's new novel, his first in six years, a twisting, overheated tale of a young black minister down on his luck, who wanders colonial Philadelphia searching not just for a beautiful African woman he has only seen twice but for his moral center. Both encounters with the woman were fleeting, almost dreamlike, but he becomes obsessed with her, almost as much as he is deeply devoted to his God.
Against a setting of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the preacher's quest to find the woman and a missing piece of his soul, which cannot be quenched by the balm of religion, is thrown off track by his witnessing of a city besieged by a plague. The plague, which attacks quickly with a brain-consuming fever and delusions, is blamed on the newly arrived blacks, imported from abroad as workers. Using the fever as a justification for racist acts, the city's powerful deny them housing, jobs, and services.
Another fascinating part of the novel is the retelling of the Xhosa fable which runs concurrently as a theme of native resistance against domination through the story of the colonial journey. The remarkable Wideman technique, which often throws as many striking images at the reader as a Fellini film, transcends time and history, leaping from an American city in its infancy to a South African field covered with corpses to a modern urban setting with young black men dying from an epidemic of gunfire.
This is indeed a myth created to examine some of the basic themes confronting every human and not just the preacher: the obsession of love, need to belong, the conflicts between the spirit and the flesh, and the ancestral blood ties. Wideman surpasses the power of his acclaimed Homewood novels here with a modern parable which encompasses many of the crucial contemporary themes from his important nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers. His latest work, The Cattle Killing, is sheer magic from a latter-day griot.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.