Brothers and Keepers

Wideman, novelist and professor at the University of Wyoming, seeks to understand how he and his brother, who is serving a life sentence for murder, could have such disparate lives after a childhood together in a Pittsburgh ghetto. Ruthless about himself, particularly about his move into the upper middle-class as a ""black intellectual,'' Wideman characterizes his brother as an intelligent, loving, proud dreamer. He raises ``existential questions'' about culture, racism and the ``grief and guilt of a brother,'' PW wrote. November