Two Cities
By John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin, $24
ISBN 0395857309

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In the past, John Edgar Wideman has often taken an intellectual, emotionally distant approach to his controversial novels examining the challenges confronting the African-American community. That has changed in his recent work.

Wideman opens his new novel with a fictional remembrance of the much-maligned John Africa and the MOVE community tragedy which rocked the city of Philadelphia a few years ago. This, however, is not just a tale of history, memory, reclamation, and racial analysis. Two Cities, despite its deceptive wrapper of protest and politics, hides a well-conceived romantic core of a pair of reluctant lovers brought together by a legacy of old yellowed photographs.

The complex love story of Kassima, a young widow recovering from the loss of her husband and child to street crime, and Robert Jones, an intense but gentle man, reaffirms Wideman's stellar ability to create characters who matter to the reader. Kassima is consumed by pain, grief, and a deadening sense of isolation that stifle her efforts to participate in the world around her. Robert, not swayed by her resistance, wishes to break through her defenses. His quest to win her heart gets an able assist from Mr. Mallory, Kassima's eccentric tenant who continually wanders throughout several black communities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia taking photographs and collecting valuable memories. The old man, with his bad leg and box camera, bestows a gift of wisdom upon Kassima when she sorts out his belongings after his death.

The friendship of Kassima and Mr. Mallory rates as one of Wideman's finest fictional achievements. Although the ailing elder asks the shy woman to burn his photos after his passing, she breaks that promise, choosing instead to keep them as a means of self-appraisal and renewal. Wideman's use of a folksy, plain-speaking narrative approach draws the readers deep into the soul of his characters and the book. Sometimes it feels as if they are sitting in the room with us, chatting without any reserve or pretense.

Criticized for being overdependent on style and experimentation, Wideman has returned to the basics, to the fundamentals of good writing with impressive results. Two Cities is indeed Wideman at his storytelling best.

Robert Fleming is a writer in New York City.