by John Edgar Wideman.

Houghton Mifflin. 227 pages. $24.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

One of the attributes of the postmodern novel is that the telling of the story preempts the story itself. The writer struts his stuff, often word-drunk, taking off on various riffs, asides, tangents, vignettes — and leaves it up to the reader to assemble the pieces.

John Edgar Wideman, an award-winning author of such books as Brothers and Keepers, who teaches at Brown, is such a writer. His novel deals with the life and legacy of Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth (1961) and Black Skin, White Masks (1952) exposed the agonizingly intimate relations between colonizers and colonized.

Fanon stalks his book like a ghost, incarnated at various intervals, as we catch glimpses of his childhood in Martinique, his involvement with the Algerian war against the French, and his career as a psychiatrist, before dying of leukemia in Maryland in 1961.

The tangle and terrible tyranny of race relations emerge from the author’s turbulent descriptions and monologues of his aged mother in a wheelchair, his brother in prison, his own wrestling with language to try to plumb the depths of such labyrinths of despair and anger, and his invention of another writer named Thomas who may or may not have received a severed head in the mail.

Much of this is very uneven. For all the luminous and lyric epiphanies that emerge — and there are several: a saints’ day parade in Martinique, the mother’s monologue, Fanon’s death, gazing at a near-empty glass of wine in July in Brittany — there are also chunks of self-conscious rambling and scrambling:

“me and the language have these conversations going on between us, between the cracks. . . .”

At one point, Wideman speaks of “words unanchored from the page, launched into random flights and formations, new sentences bumped aside by newer sentences. . . .” At another, of “a sort of bricolage of free-floating fragments whose authorship is unsettlingly ambiguous.”

There’s nothing inherently problematic with this form, but with someone as fascinating as Fanon, his life and his revelations, I kept wanting to get back to him. The wordplay, puns and spiraling cascades of associative leaps kept getting in the way of the man himself, however mixed his legacy, however uncertain the reception of his message.

I like the probing and the questioning — “What’s in a metaphor anyway. What’s in an image. What language does it speak” — but I ached for more of Fanon, the person, the preacher and the psychiatric healer. The brilliant episodes startle and delight, but the telling all too often upends the tale. FANON,