Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society

Novelist and professor of humanities and fine arts at the Univ. of Massachusetts, Wideman wrote powerfully about his incarcerated younger brother in Brothers and Keepers. Here he draws on his strained relationship with his father, Edgar, for affecting if not always self-revealing stories. Wideman's prose is assured, his narratives roundabout. ``This country... stands between black fathers and sons,'' he declaims. For 30 years his father has been separated from his mother and the rest of the family; Wideman takes Edgar from Pittsburgh to South Carolina on a roots trip and, after hearing a white professor who has enjoyed a life style denied to his father, the author becomes furious. But intrafamily insensitivity causes Edgar to inadvertently miss grandson Danny's wedding; there, Wideman's description of Danny's grandmothers-``a black woman and a white woman with skin the same color''-and his Sierra Leonian in-laws suggest a family somehow transcending the box of race. But it's not that simple. Wideman's final chapter explains that these ``father stories'' are an attempt to connect with his own lost son, Jake, convicted some seven years earlier of killing a peer. It may seem callous to ask Wideman to peel back more pain, but this chapter is disappointingly oblique. (Oct.)